If I want to be disassociated, staring at screems is a big aid. If not, less screen time is more here time. Learning to accept the gift of life, of being exactly where I am right now, being present for animals, vegetable and minerals I'm sharing air space with is a big project and screen time is time off from that project.

The thing about writing about nuclear stuff is dealing with the rage.

A nuclear bomb explosion looks angry. People on both sides of discussions of nuclear weapons and nuclear power tend to seem like they are shaky dams barely holding back seas of rage.

And this rage has to be at least partly expressed in technical language. It's hard to speak truly, deep and in a way that lets other people in about nuclear stuff.

Maybe it is partly that our bodies are enraged that we have used the long story they are part of to create this broad, long-lasted danger. Our bodies may be enraged way below words, and then we try to talk about it all in words.

Should I be grateful that I am in many ways incredibly lucky? Or should I take all the big luck for granted and daily find things to complain about?

Thinking about walking. Thinking while walking. Thinking about walking while walking. Thinking in a situation that shows movement is possible because movement is happening.

The relentless, addicted evil of the world is silly. It hides its silliness by having horrendous consequences, but it often comes from a place petty and dumb.

Life is weird, sometimes in a good direction.

We read on December 23 the play "Antigone" aloud to each other.

The light starts returning because some stands up to the king.

Unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given, and the government shall be upon this kid's shoulders.

In a democracy, that's ideally true of all kids. We don't want them indifferent or living under oppressions so government grinds on without them.

Since government is going to be on their shoulders, we should all give them all good gifts, like good schools, kind surroundings, much quiet attention. And kids so treated might be called later wonderful, consolller, a person you can talk to who will listen you toward peace. The kingdom of this world will become more like the world of our ideals if we are wisely kind to kids, all of them. They are going to wear the government and be the government, so we see a kid, we don't think of how to criticize but sing
"Hallelujah!"

To make my country sane--that would be a good thing to do. I don't think it's in my power. I have no idea how some smart group might do it.

If some group with power in my country seems to be nuts, and I enter in dialogue to point that out, chances are overwhelming that I will in some way mirror their energy, and I too will be nuts while emitting different content.

Einstein said you can't solve a problem on the level at which it was created. You have to go to the next level. Good to have a goal, even if clueless about how to get there.

Discomfort and excitement can be symptoms of moving to the next level, which is a change from the self-righteous rage often created by arguing on this level.

Rain is a valuable part of a balanced diet of weather.

Rounded mammals like pigs and moles, and bears when they're down on all fours, curve like the surface of their planet.

Open up the. Close down the. Your art is for that.

A lot of people who don't seem to have much in common have in common that they strongly believe the religion they grew up with. Lucky for them that they were born into the one that's correct.

If you interupt people's settled routine of craziness, some of the unsettled craziness may head your way.

Zall is the all that starts right where we thought was everything ends.

Leaving out a lot can make me and my kind of knowledge look big.

It isn't health big. I'm infected with inaccuracy and inflamed.

If I let more kinds of knowledge in, including the knowledges I'll never be best at, the inflammation starts to subside. I feel odd, with a kind of health I'm not used to.

Our lady of what we need right now, help us, and then help us get over the shock that that is what we need.

There's the solstice where the one star shines for the longest tie, and there's the solstice where the many stars shine longest.

We're close to the many star solstice, so I need to still down and listen to them.

You can throw, but gently, gently. Gently, gently, you can throw.

Very drunk on the street corner at five til noon, he kept asking his friend, who wasn't drunk, "Are you okay?"

Everything is secretly fine.

[*last line: changed first knows to shows}

December light says, "Think."

December light says, "Go below thinking."

December light shows that below thinking is gold and grey that knows.

* [ Third sentence, added at end, clause about personal style] To become very smart about an issue affecting a place and people you care about is not that hard.

I mean, it's only work, focused work.

You don't have to go through a woo-woo secret process turning you into the kind of expert hired by the other team with that kind of expert's personal style.

You just have to learn lots and all the way along say it back to yourself clearly. Saying it to yourself clearly is your practice for saying it to other people who also care about the same place and people you care about.

The sun is coming back, the sun is always here.

You can be any number of appropriate sizes.

I turn on the radio first thing in order to understand what people I don't know want me to worry about today.

Can't just pick the best fruit. Need to listen to the tree.

I'm not sure it's a natural thing, but it is a common thing here and now. So it seems natural.

Which makes it a good thing to think about before I march along with it, if I can get far enough outside it to think about it.

We never met a biome we didn't like to kill.

Start heart art.

My ankle sort of hurts, like a small sprain without there having been a particular sprain moment. Also, it's December, so it reminds me of the place in the I Ching where it says the king used to close the passes for the winter solstice. The weather might close the passes anyway, so go with that. It's part of an I Ching hexagram that says don't do much now. It's chillier, darker, and I hurt just a bit. Hope I can hear that.

Moon, sun.

Puddle, lake, river, bay, sea.

An orb is glowing with light in the sky. Below, the orb's light is reflected in water. Since we have two sky orbs and lots of water, this happens a lot. It's happening all over, with varying degrees of beauty and noticedness.

Walk, and the light walks with you

Don't throw it out. Keep until you notice its next use.

It is a beautiful day, somewhere. Here, if I can only unwhine.

Where the building starts right at the sidewalk, the human-made stuff turns a sharp corner from that which I can easily walk on to that which I can't walk on at all.

Sometimes, on that rim, nature wants there to be a yard there, even though that isn't in the human plan, and a few shoots of grass grow up.

All those years before cameras, paint was asked to speak about objects that weren't paint. Then cameras came, and paint wanted to speak for itself.

Stonehenge is rotating toward one of the times it was built to meet.

If birds are angels, that would help explain why things often turn out okay, when they just as easily could have turned out awful.

Gliding in the air, blessing. Sitting among the tree twigs, blessing. Pecking at the bread crumbs on the ground, blessing.

They're there.

Shekhina is Hebrew for the female manifestation of God. Some say that when the escapees follows a pillar of fire to get across the desert that was Shekhina.

Shekhina was much talked of by the Hebrew mystics in Hasidism as they lived their intense spiritual lives in a gender-segregated society. I mean, they were married, but men and women lived much of their lives seperately. When men had been studying spiritual things a long time, like when they were fifty, they were considered safe enough to study shekhina.

Reading through Kings 1 and 2, two books in the Hebrew Bible, you'll come across lists of kings, king after king. It can seem a bit non-fascinating, just to look at. It gets more interesting when you notice that it says that a certain king completely ended worship of gods other than the one, true, guy god. Then read on and it says another kind completely wiped out non-guy god worship. Then yet another king wiped it out later.

They wiped it out, but they kept having to wipe it out again.

Usually in the Hebrew Bible, the bad god to worship is called Baal. Feminists point out that this in itself is a cover-up. Baal wasn't a main god. He was a consort for a main god, Asarte. So when they say again and again that Baal was no longer worshipped they meant Asarte was no longer worshiped, without even mentioning her name.

There's a way of reading the Hebrew body where it looks like a lively and sometimes violent dialogue about either worshiping one god, a male, or a group of god, the main of them a female.

It looks like the fight went on and on. The male god winners wrote the story, but traces of the dialogue remain, especially once you understand that the much mentioned and castigated Baal was the consort of the main, almost unnamed, female god.

Then, hundreds of years later, older Jewish men on the mystical fringe were allowed to start learning about Shekinah.