Making the planet habitable, breaking up the harshness as tree roots do, slowly over time.

A fertility goddess now would say in a convincing way don't live in a way that kills so much.

When the archeology folk find what they say are fertility goddesses on the floor of the cave or wherever, they move right along and don't say much. "Oh, yeah, fertility goddess."

Historians, some of them, are riveted by trying to figure out the rules of the control gods across time. But we've played at the control thing to the point where we are threatening the basic fertility of home, so I think we need to pick up those fertility goddesses and give a listen.

The Quint Essentials, "five gentlemen from St. Matthews Lutheran Church in Walnut Creek" sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the San Francisco 49ers preseason game at Candlestick Park on August 22, 2009.

Close harmony, no instruments to accompany, emphasizing parts of the harmony that didn't carry what we usually think of as the tune, the arranged it so differently it was almost a different, and to me better, song and beautiful. I really liked it. The crowd cheered but I didn't know if that was because they liked it too or because the game was about to start.

It used to be that both gravity and levity were thought to be physical forces.

Gravity was the force that made stuff go down; levity made stuff go up.

As it has worked out, gravity is a hugely important part of physics studied by giants of understanding and systemitizing, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Levity is left to us daily muddlers. Not a huge physical force but a human option. If I trip because of imperfections and fall down because of gravity, I can take that event with levity, or not.

Something essential about San Francisco lives in the fact that there is a trolley line called the N Judah and a trolley line called the J Church. Something about the hills and the microclimates demands an avoidance of a certain kind of obvious.

No J Judah here. The city lives in gorgeousness and quirks.

Notices photocopied on brightly colored paper of bands playing in bars are often masking taped to telephone poles and light posts, and sometimes are ripped down by people who don't like them being there and crumpled up and thrown into nearby public trash cans.

If the cans are fairly full when the crumpled posters hit, the top of the can becomes a circular abstract of bright colors available at copy shops and bent letters. The blacks look blacker against purple, yellow, orange when they don't mean anything anymore. The colors freed of flatness and the letters freed of meaning dance, pink, red, blue.

The whole world becomes more textured as my nerve endings wake up.

Sometimes it is more important to keep moving than it is to do whatever it is well.

Thinking logically about sex. Thinking sexily about logic. Thinking about eternity in a body less long-lasting.

Saint Francis, San Francisco, when he gave away all his possessions was filled with joy because he didn't have to look for parking anymore. He talked to birds and bishops. A bit too candid maybe, holy Frank.

Has your boss been promoted too high? Is your boss moody and unpredictable? Do you wish your boss would get sane soon?

King Saul's servants went to him and said, "You seem to be possessed by demons. We were thinking that maybe if you got a harp player in here to play you music it might make the demons go away."

Saul said that seemed like a good idea, which showed he was desperate too. The servants then said they had heard that David, son of Jesse, was an amazing harp player, it might be good to try him. Done, and it semi-worked.

David made Saul feel better while David was playing. He didn't heal him overall.

Saul like having David around, even when he wasn't playing and made him his weapon carrier.

Saul was the first king of Israel, so he didn't have role models close at hand to copy. One reason he was king was that the people of Israel noticed all the other peoples around had kings, and they wanted one too.

Another reason they wanted a king was that the prophet/judge system wasn't working well right then. They had been going along having a main prophet, at this point Samuel, who had general ideas about good things to do, that were pretty much listened to. Then when they needed a military leader, a military leader would arise and with some miraculous or semi-miraculous help from God, would win.

The Book of Judges is stories of those leaders who arose, Samson and Deborah for example. They're sort of fun stories in an often bloody way, because they are stand alone. People are going along being agrarian and self-sufficient and maybe a little boring, and some crisis arises, and the person arises and solves the crisis, and the people fall back into being low-key and agrarian.

I imagine that maybe Saul like that low-key agrarian routine, and might have been a good one shot hero, or judge, but on-going kingness didn't suit him. It might have been too much time inside. It might have been making decisions less concrete and urgent than military decisions.

The people of Israel chose Saul to be their first king because he was a foot taller than everyone else and because he was about that much handsomer than everyone else.

And there he was, seeming possessed by demons. And getting temporary relief from a talented kid from nowhere special playing music.

That is the first story of how Saul and David met for the first time.

Right after that there is a second story of how Saul and David met for the first time.

By the time Bible stories were written down, they had been being told aloud for quite awhile, by different people, in different regions. These stories weren't necessarily consistent with each other. If you read stuff more than three hundred years old, you find that people back then, high and low, didn't care that much about consistency. It's a recent fetish, and a strong one. What the people who put the Bible together as writing did was include important stories, even if they were contradictory, and put them next to each other.

So right after Saul meets David because David is a music guy Saul meets David because David is a sling guy, eager to take on Goliath.

The Bible putter-together folks set up the ending of the harp story so it could segue into the Goliath story if you messed with the Goliath story a little, but they didn't. They said at the end of the harp story that Saul made David his weapon carrier. That would easier put David in the army camp when the very large Philistine Goliath challenged anyone in the Saul army to single handed combat. David could have already been there, as king's weapon carrier. But he wasn't. The Goliath story is a different story of how David rose from obscurity to the court of the (in over his tall head) king.

[This is recounted toward the beginning of the book First Samuel, toward the beginning of the Bible.]

The same color is leaping and thinking all over the painted building wall--leaping when the sunlight meets the wall directly and thinking where the sunlight is detoured by tree branches and tree leaves. A flat wall looking bumpy, looking good.

The whole point is to make you a cog who thinks it's happy and doesn't think.

Let's go back to "I don't know." The "I don't know" plan, notable for its accuracy.

Will I let the altar alter me, or will I beg the altar to let me stay the same?

The Stevie Smith poem which speaks of angels is called "No Categories!"

Some people, working from the Bible, speak of levels of angels. Archangels sounds high, but in this system is second to the lowest, below, for example, principalities and powers.

A Bible person talking to God comments that God made people a little lower than the angels.

Stevie Smith says she cries to the God who made her not to angles with their "do this and that" of "appropriate admonishment."

Angels say, Stevie Smith writes, "do better aspire higher," and you may move up the hierarchy a bit. "This is not what the Creator meant."

"He made this and that/And laughed to see them grow fat."

"No hierarchies I pray."

Stevie Smith reads easy and is not predictable.

The planet evolving flowers led to the planet evolving people who put them in vases.

On the way to already being there.

Bless us as we use less, notice more.

The whole galumphing package is perfect for the task at hand.

The empire, and I'm dancing. The empire, and I'm eating. The empire crushes some. I don't know how to keep my caring about the crushing from being crushed.

The parts of San Francisco that I've lived in, the houses don't have front yards, or barely.

Some people put container plants along the sidewalk in front of their house if it's wide.

A house with a row of container plants next to itself, plants which seem happy and wild like they think they are in the exact place they were evolved to be is painted white in a straightforward manner except for the big green circle painted mostly above the plants but the bottom of the circle painted behind them.

Turn head sideways, feel instead of look. Make it a different place.

Stasis stays as is, except that that which is organic can't not change, so if you happen to be an organism, stasis gets worse. When times are tough, doing the other thing, however minor, might open up a path.

I like life anyway, right now.

It's a beauty emergency. Beauty is emerging and must be taken in.

A safety pin? A paper clip? A sun ray that touches us both? Lightly attached.

The hidden gems of a city are not places passersby can see if they follow directions from the knowledgable, but lives steadily lived.

Feathers don't take it so hard, falling. Being evolved for the medium they are moving through, air, they move lightly, back and forth, land easier than the straightdown rock.

Caused maybe by God or gods, caused maybe by a small planet with a large amount of time, "Experiments in Being Alive" has had, to date, mixed results.

All the women I've touched as I've put clothes on. I haven't touched them. I've touched what they've touched, the cloth and thread they've made be shapes I can use. The cloth they touched touches me all day.

We will make it nicer by making it be not what it is.

We will bulldoze. We will sand. Have you noticed you're too bumpy?

I just wanted to fly and sing is all, and they didn't like it.

Early morning before we've made our usual choices, other ways seem possible. Maybe they are.

Nature likes ramifications.Nature likes branchings. Trees, arteries, nerves.

Split,get littler. Leaf out, capillary down, jump the tiny electric gap. She's with you.

Bookshelves, just the shelves the books would rest on, not the upright pieces that make the whole thing work to hold books above the floor.

Four white rectangles. Four white, painted plywood rectangles, higglety-pigglety on top of each other in the early morning sun.

Gleaming faint yellow, faint blue, against the asphalt of the empty parking place at the edge of the street. Dawn declares many things art that are mid-day trash.

Something about how regular the pieces are and how irregularly they are angled at each other now makes many rearrangements seem possible, right at the edge of brain light

Let's play king of the tiny mountain.

*[added credit] Sean Carroll is a scientist, a geneticist, who is studying how butterfly markings and tiger markings and giraffe markings evolved. A bumpy beauty guy.
--He's mentioned in the article "Modern Darwins" in the February, 2009 issue of "National Geographic," that month containing Darwin's 200th birthday.

Einstein is sometime quoted as saying, "God doesn't play dice." He is sometimes quoted as saying, "The Old One doesn't play dice." The second is more like what he's say.

He didn't believe in a personal God. He believed that the way everything fits together and works, and the beauty and complexity of how it works adds up to the Old One, whom he was playing to figure out, who he challanged and profoundly admired.

He thought that that Old Way, the whole way thing are when you understand them, doesn't play dice. He believed profoundly in determinism--this causes that causes that, inevitably. If you understood the chain of cause, you'd know the inevitability of all that happens.

Einstein's work was massively importantly in starting quantam physics, which he disliked and didn't belived.

Quantam physics says determinism is not what is happening at the smallest, most basic level. For Einstein, that went totally against his gut and why he got into physics.

So he spent the last decades of his life trying to prove that quantam physics, which he helped create, was wrong.

Niels Bohr, younger, said Einstein's intelligent opposition to quantam physics helped it develop faster. He asked good questions.

But after the part where he helped Bohr and others by challenging them, he got nowhere, because he was trying to oppose quantam physics. In a way, it might not matter, because in fields where high math is thick upon the ground, very few people do important work when they are older. So Einstein didn't do important work when he was older, in a focussed kind of way.

I think that thing where he got into physics because he loved determinism and then he helped destroy the determinism of physics, is the kind of thing the Old One does sometimes, and laughs.

--info from the book "Einstein and Religion"

Get up in the morning; go out and make the pie bigger.

When angry, I sometimes remember to count to a multiple of twelve or a multiple of eighteen. Ten doesn't take long enough to count to for the stupidity-encouraging chemicals to clear out.

Thirty-six is both.

Take your soul on a picnic. Let it breathe goalessly.

Some leaves are shaped like tear drops except for the wide end being pointed a bit where it meets the stem.

New blocks of sidewalk tend to be light grey, whitish and sometime blueish.

They age toward darker grey, sometimes with some brown.

Water darkens the grey and brings out the brown, if any.

This block of sidewalk is half wet from morning drizzle which is drying. A blodgey border lies between dry grey and wet darker grey brown. On the daker part lie two small leaves, about thumb length and tear-like, one at the center and green, the other near and corner and red.

The green and red stand out against the greys and browns.

I don't think they crying because they didn't get to fall on dirt and rot usefully. I don't think they're crying. Plants and their parts seem to take what comes.

Let the dank and chilly breezes blow. Let the sun not sun all day. Let July in San Francisco be July in San Francisco.

You know the part where humans act toward each other in ways that are brutal and harsh. I don't like that part.

This kind of weather is easy to live in. Kind weather.

They will have been running uphill a good while when they get here.

Signs around the neighborhood say streets will be closed Sunday starting at 6 A.M. for the San Francisco Marathon.

" Yay!" On Sunday, some people will sit or stand for a long time as the unners pass, shuting encouragement to strangers--"You're doing great!" "You can do it!" "Go, go,go!"--fairly holy sounds on a Sunday morning.