If I am indignantly going "this shouldn't be the way it is," I am worthlessizing my time.

It is the way it is. I need to adapt. Part of adapting might be making a plan to change it and living out the plan, but huffing and puffing inside myself against the nature of reality changes nothing but my mood.

Palm trees and pillars are visually somewhat similar.

Being in the presence of an actual angel might seem chilly, even as the angel produced healing warmth, because an angel's experience is different than the experiences of we fumblers and muddlers through.

Hilary Mantel's book "Fludd" is good on the warmth and chill of having an angel around the house.

What you've got going for you, as a non-angel, when you're in a position to help, is your flaws, which help you fit right in. You can do a bit of angel work without being so discombobulating.

One problem with getting importantitis and insisting on dealing with only important things is I am making the assumption that I know what is important and what isn't, I don't.

A hidel, short i, is a hiding place. Your favorite hiding place is. . .?

Somebody else making a door for me into my own heart. Art.

You're haughty. What are you hiding?

Cui bono is often translated, from the Latin, "Who benefits?" It is a way of looking for who did a crime. Who benefited from the crime?

"Cui," literally, means, "to whose," and "bono" means "good."

To whose good is it that this things happened?

If you live in the shiny part of an empire, you don't have to do the crime to benefit from the crime. I live in the shiny part of an empire.

Fernand Braudel, the historian, wrote about the difference between the mess and desperation of the edge of the empire, the dwellings built of trash, and the shiny faces and shiny shop windows at the center. He was smart about how the shine meeds the grime and the hunger; they are all part of one thing.

We could meet on the corner and save the world, just a little.

We could meet on the corner and save the world, just a little. Then do something quiet. We could drink tea and notice the effects of local breezes.

Leaves magically make air we can breathe and then float on their way to rotting, all calmly.

When I first heard the loud recorded bird cries outside the 24th Street BART station, I assumed it was an artwork, songs installed by artist for a while. Around here you can do a vast number of art things with official okay if you're okay with them being temporary.

I heard them as tropical birds, pictures a rain forest instead of concrete and brick. The newspaper told me it was officially art; it was a scare the pigeons away to reduce pigeon droppings deal.

The cries were the cries of predator birds that might eat pigeons, the cries they make when swooping for the kill and meal. I think it nature you wouldn't hear that many one after another, on and on. I haven't heard hawks, but I've seen them, and they seem to work one at a time.

I liked the nature noises. I kept hearing them as rain forest actions though they weren't.

I moved and didn't go to that BART station for a while. When I came back, the bird noise was gone. I heard the silence it left, amidst the car noise. I guess hearing that silence was a sort of artwork too.

A lot of times where it is is closer.

Liquid, so dissolving, often helpfully.

Often, you don't have to solve the problem, if circumstances dissolve it or dissolve you feeling that it's a problem.

The connection is that both are naturally occuring and both are beauty.

If whatever it is starts dumb, it is unlikely to get smarter as it goes along. It will probably get dumber.

You might get hurt.

Oh, right--wrong again.

Check. Reset.

Think. Lead. Heal.

A smart woman I know says she isn't sure that she thinks. Thinking isn't, for her, an accurate word for how she knows what she knows.

She knows a lot, too. She just doesn't know a word for how she gets from experience to wisdom.

I remember that when I imagine writing about women leaders, imagine talking to women leaders about how they lead.

Is lead the word most accurate? Is it the word for what some women do to move to group, to help the group move itself, to help people in the group shine their real shine?

Is it safe to talk about ways of being that help us proceed in a way that is good for each other and for the future?

Go ahead, and do the healing as you can. Rest, eat good food, and heal some more. A press release may not always be necessary.

What's happening in your interior valleys?

Doing things gently can be efficient because it creates less resistance and less breakage.

Doing things gently can be efficient because it creates less resistance and less breakage.

It's foggy.

The everyday green of the leaves, peeking through the thickening and wisps of the grey air, looks as magical and powerful as it always is.

God has given us, underneath all the gifts, the gift of ambiguity.

The same everything can be experienced by humans in different ways. In this world, the world we're in, you can't say, "The world is X" and have everyone agree, no matter what X is. If God made the world, that is basic to what God made. Maybe wanted our large brains to get exercise, give us something to talk about. It's all a test to see if we can honor folks who feel it all differently?

There's beauty, and there's having rights. If people have rights, it's easier for them to make their beauty.

The work can be divided so that men are the department of having adventures and women are the department of things going on.

Irregularly shaped, naturally occuring and beautiful. Rocks? Our souls?

Maybe the moon is a gem we all share, glittering rock of beauty, making an ring around us.

Stories and moments and noticing moments that are not stories.

To go from where we are, with a base ten system to a base twelve system we would ahve to create numerals for ten and eleven. We'd have to redo ceturies of books and figurings.

If we were in base twelve, writing that there were 10 widgets would mean there were twelve widgets. Writing 100 widgets would mean there were one hundred forty four widgets, twelve times twelve. I noticed on the sidewalk a pice of wood that might have been an escapee from a widget. Small and circular, it looked like a store bought cookie, about cookie size with curves around the edges and a hole in the middle.

It also looked like a simplified flower, so I thought of you. Give you flowers, one or a dozen, often feels accurate. I don't know if the dozen flower thing goes back to the Babylonians who had a bas twelve number system.

The twelves submerged in our time-keeping go back to the Babylonians--twelve hours in half a day and start counting again, twelve months in a year. And the time things divisible by twelve--twenty-four hours in a whole day, sixty (five times twelve) minutes in a hour, seconds in a minute.

I read a pamphlet from the Duodecimal Society that said that twelve is a better base number than ten, partly because it's divisible by more other numbers. Both 12 and 10, like all whole numbers, are divisible by themselves and one.

Ten is divisible also by two and five. Twelve is divisible by two, three, four, and six--twice as many divisors above the two all numbers have.

The Duodecimal Society folks saying having a base that is easier to take apart and put back together in different ways would make the arithmetic and mathematics are daily lives swim in subtly and pervasively easier.

Sort of reminds me some of being connected with you--subtle and pervasive increased ease. Warm, fuzzy fireworks--good, famous in movies. Generalized increased access to daily grace--less famous, also good.

It's easier for me to learn to live in that grace and ease than it would be for all of us to go to base twelve. But the learning does involve change, like learning to work with new numerals, so sometimes I'm slow on the uptake.

Would you like a wood scrap? I found it in that place of possiblities, the commons.

Peace piece, here now, thank you.

It is important that I know what I know and that I don't fake knowing things I don't know.

Faking things I don't know may act like a yes vote on something I don't understand enough to get that it's creepy.

Eighteen is the number of life in Hebrew and Yiddish. Eighteen comes up a lot in the daily round of numbers. It doesn't hurt to feel eighteen as a blessing--or as a question about whether this thing you're involved in is a blessing.

I need to learn to value the holy little, to value that which is wholly little.

I will find a category that looks sort of like me. I will twist and turn myself until I think I fit it. I will then be happy.

The weak central governments of Middle Ages Europe did not like tournaments--gatherings where knights fought each other for sport.

For knights to kill or permanently disable each other was not the point, but it could and did happen, and then the central government had lost a trained fighter, since knights were fighters, farm managers and elite political players, all in one.

The government, the monarch, needed the knights,but were not strong enough to stop them from having their rough fun.

It happened early, when it didn't yet look like there was a lightening, but it felt like there was a lightening.

The commons is a place to notice that more is going on than I notice when I'm inside.

If I nothingize, I can skip some colds.

If I voluntarily let my body shut down in the daytime now and then, it doesn't have to make me miserable to get a break.

Along that stretch of sidewalk, I picked up a pizza box and a corn chip bag and a black plastic shopping bag and carried them to the next trash can.

I didn't pick up the new-looking lime green piece of tissue wrapping paper lying in the middle of the sidewalk. I thought it made the sidewalk square it was lying on look like a gift waiting to be wrapped.

She doesn't have to complain. She can fix it.

People go to war to get more meaning, but sometimes they end up feeling less meaning.

If you are wise in the ways of lines, you can make them act like curves. You can then predict what curves will do.

Once you're good at that, you can create objects and events you couldn't create before.

There are many lines between humans, some armed and dangerous.

Maybe we could learn a way to make those lines heal, curve around, and bring us together. Maybe more than one person at the same time will notice how to do this.

I like the way she heals me. It's neat. Partly neat as in tidy--the right touch at the right time.

It doesn't matter so much how deep the waters are if you can float.

Yeti, bigfoot, let them be. Please, God, keep them safe from wel.

War is full is full of ingenuity and sadness.

Walking north on Downey Street is quite downy. Walking the other way is uppy.

Caffeine helps well with getting the to-do list done. It is less good at helping to think of a list worth doing. Caffeine likes movement, doesn't care so much about meabing.

Now begins November, the time of public rotting pumpkins.

I was at a gathering of idealists with an open mike time, for suggestions about how any one of us could help with the great healing. Many suggestions were ripped from the headlines, from what was generally and loudly being worried about.

One woman stood on the grass we were gathered on and said anyone can compost for the Earth by burying some vegetable matter wherever. Not to dig up and use on one's own garden, but to improve that soil right there, helping to make up for our general human soil overuse and scraping away.

Burying has a thematic relationship to Hallowe'en. So one might start a tiny tradition of burying the jack-o-lantern rather than letting it rot on the porch.

Do it with a child and the child later remembers it as part of Hallowe'en, and as an adult does it with a child, and we start to hallow the soil a bit as part of our all Hallow's Eve after action.

It is raining. We could do Christmas now, before the pervasive, intense, undefined demandingness sets in.

Clogged drain and the first big rain makes a big puddle at the corner, a puddle that goes halfway across the skinny street.

The big rain was last night. Now it isn't raining. The puddle is still, and I try to see down into what is doing the clogging. If it's just leaves in the drain grate maybe I can find a stick and make it a little bit better.

I can't see down into the puddle, but while I'm trying I notice the reflection of a tree crown exactly fits the puddle. Branches becoming smaller branches, smaller branches sending off twigs, nature's open ended triangles making a rough circle that filld the smooth reflecting puddle. The grey hope morning sky shines between twigs and branches. Clogged drain and beauty.

Go low, like roots.

It slides; I ride. It gives my feet a pushing off point and a landing place.

Older than the world "north," older than the word "America," it moves around the Earth's thick skin and changes. Right now it's shaped like a boquet of flowers, with stems curving through the warm water, flowers blooming in the cold.