What you know is enough.

Please do not open.

The way you know is enough.

Please do not open.

We know now to manage you as you are now.

Please do not open.

I mustn't spend much time noticing what people like me are being told to notice. Almost anything else is better. Best to notice is something I'm naturally drawn to that is currently underemphasized in this place among this kind of folk

I feel like showing off for you, but maybe I could do this other thing of being quiet and letting my center self come through.

Leave exile by somehow sitting here like it's home.

copyright 2010 Anne Herbert All rights reserved

The world is out there, kind of cute, if I'm acute enough to catch the good parts.

When I'm on my daily round and I talk to people from other countries, there's a communication gap because they think that the place they are from is at least as real as the place we're sitting in, whereas I know that the place they are from is only semi-existent and lacks details.

From the north came reindeer, bearing antlers and saying, "Weird weather. But the kid looks good."

Bridges and holy buildings aspire to cross a gap.

Some are merry because they have been enjoying the group artwork that is the Christmas season. Others are merry because the group insanity which is the Christmas season is finally drawing to a close.

Proclaim liberty throughout the land, and try to figure out what to do with it.

The stories that didn't happen because people were being squashed by other people also matter.

It is impossible to be accurate about what didn't happen, but it is good to try to find those missing happenings.

Faith Ringgold made paintings with words on them that tell the story of an American woman who went to Paris in the 1920's and lived there and had fun, sometimes profound fun, like some Americans did in Paris in the twenties. This woman was African-American, so she is an example of someone who didn't do that, of the kind of person who didn't get to do that because of a steel taspestry of constraints. But Faith Ringgold makes it happen for the time anyone is looking at the painting, or remembering it.

I'm reading Herbert Butterfield's exceedingly wonderful book about the history of science, which is about how scientists mananged to change their minds around to be ready for the next breakthrough. Sometimes, the breakthrough which seemed, from out point of view, to be right there, didn't happen for a long time because minds had to somehow change what they were capable of thinking.

Copernicus worked out a system where the Earth revolved around the sun. Right. He had the Earth revolve around the sun in a perfect circle. Wrong. It was more than an century before Kepler, after a lot of work and thought work by others, got to ellipses, which are how planets revolve around the sun.

All scientists were incredibly constrained by the idea that that which was most real was most perfect. The most real things had to be perfect; the basic movement might be the Earth moving rather than the Sun, but it still had to be perfect, a perfect circle, not a funky but understandable ellipse. It took a lot of observations, and Copernicus' theory being around a long time til the perfect circle idea kind of wore away, as Butterfield shows in detail, then Kepler first, then others could perceive how it really works.

Butterfield is not the department of who didn't get to think about things like that; he is not the department of who never had a chance.

What scientists slowly realized in the early science times Butterfield is writing about is what we are still living in in many ways, our minds constrained as theirs were, in ways we can't feel yet, or get beyond.

What is missing because so many kinds of people were missing from the finding out process? What is still missing?

I don't know. Who could know? In a way, scientists of groups left out in the past might know, but they are really busy. It isn't their kind of question. Whose kind of question is it? Yours?

You think of it. Quickly, it's gone. It can't stay in your mind because it doesn't fit with now, doesn't fit with the whole now style, with what now says yes and no to without thinking. It might be a shard from a pot from a better future.

At the time when more men were painting angels because more men were painting, more women were doing what angels who appeared to them said to do, and hearing back from humans, "Thank you!" or "God, you're odd."

Sensitive like a drop of water. Strong, like a dorp of water.

Commercial matting is what people walk on on both sides of the doors to a big building. If it were possible to really bless commericial matting, you could really do some good.

Maybe you can feel it when stepping on the fancy-schmancy mat printed with a design from a century-old hand woven carpet or on the plain plastic grey strip. Maybe you feel the blessing coming up to you that someone has left to help someone else get through.

As your routine day begins, blessings. Half-way through it, nourishing blessings. Blessings on the end of that part of the day. Blessings on the way in to the job interview, on the way out after the lay-off interview, blessing in knowing how to know that the door out is the door to everywhere else.

The group doesn't force you to lie. It's a matter of emphasis. There are things you naturallly notice and think about that the group doesn't want you to talk about. Getting sickly silence when you speak is no fun, so you don't talk in that direction. Not talking is easier if you don't notice and don't think in that direction. There are also some mild feelings you naturally have that the group likes. So you intensify your expression of these emotions which intensifies your inner experience of them. The applause that follows expressing these popular emotions helps fill the space left by the things you don't notice anymore. Over time, your mind is custom designed, but not for you.

Canute really existed and really was king of England. The most told story about him, we don't know if it happened.

Canute took his courtiers down to the beach and ordered the tide to stop coming it. It didn't stop coming in, but kept on, as per eons old usual.

There are two interpretations of this story. One is that Canute was an arrogant idiot. Another is that Canute was teaching his aides the limits of his power.

Easy to imagine either--in the first, sycophancy has rotted his brain. In the second, the sycophants keep filling his ears with good ideas and bad ideas far beyond what the ruler to two seperate countries (he was also king of Norway) could possibly do in times of crummy transport and government that was decentralized to the point of barely existing above the village level, and he got tired of it, and told the good ideas folk to come on down to the beach.

Is this the part where I have a sense of humor? Maybe, but I'm in the middle of constructing a grievance, intricate in its details and boring in its total effect.

Here's a fuzzy-minded dreamer smiling deep inside the empire. I'm comfortable because of why?

Here are for you some flowers. Which are drooping a bit because I've been holding them tight, because I tend to try too hard. Underneath the trying too hard is something good and pretty simple which you seem to be able to see. Thank you for helping me be.

Did animals get a sense of something being different as primates landed on the moon?