The initial expansion continues. We're running away with the sky.

The sky is falling. No one's perfect. The sky is rising. Air molecules move.

A trap is offered me that is more comfortable and convenient. I don't know what an untrap looks like, so I'm tempted.

If Christianity had done what Christmas carols promise, conditions would be different.

Instead of fighting it, you might be able to go under--sink, whoosh, and you're on the other side.

Religious processions are happening right now. May they get the best result, the wisest best.

Every green is more itself because it rained this morning.

The famous building that from this angle looks just like itself. Not faraway, the side entrance of the famous building that looks like many other side entrances.

The rundown building that looks, in a way, beautiful. The rundown building that I can't make look anything but ugly.

This parking meter. That parking meter.

All these are part of the city, as is the moment when you nodded.

Reading an article about new translations of old Russian novels, I learn that earlier translations of Dostoyevski tended to clean him up and make him more logical and consistent and reasonable than he actually was as he wrote.

I was happy to hear that because in the translation of Dostoyevski I've read, the not-fitting-togetherness of it all is still evident after the clean-up and works just fine.

For example, there's the "we" of "The Brothers Karamozov." Every once in a while, not consistently, we suddenly have a narrator who is suddenly saying what "we" knew about what was going on. "We" being who precisely? That isn't clear if I come from my double-entry bookkeeping mind. But it works in the narrative. We the village. We the group in a place where the group was stronger than in any place I've ever lived. We knew. If you try to work it out to a specific we, like this specifici village, it doesn't consistentently work. But it works in reading it because Dostoyevski lives in a strong we. I presume his culture had a strong we and he really picked up on it.

And then there's Dostoyevski's "Notes from Underground," much shorter than a novel but really painful to read, and convincing. The guy narrating lives in a city and feels isolated. Dostoyevski lives at the beginning of a certain kind of isolation becoming more common, as people left the village we and went to the city and sat alone in a room and walked along in the streets, and, if they were like the narrator of "Notes from Underground," felt horrible. Convincing, deeply, pervasively horrible, atoms of soul coming apart horrible.

I remember what I remember of "The Brothers Karamazov" as if it were an event witnessed, not a book read. And I don't remember it all, because the events are so different in style and assumptions than what I'm used to. A lot of books on the great books list, old-fashioned version, are from nineteenth century Britain and are handy views of how to be much more repressed and indirect in communication than USA people often are.

In "The Brothers Karamozov," I see people all the time howling in the streets when they feel bad, and the village, or whoever is around. "Notes from Underground" is from a hell partly made of unexpressed emotions that can't be expressed to any of the people rushing by. In "The Brothers Karamozov," the angry brother is angry indoors and out and cares not who hears and sees. The holy brother is out on the streets trying, with a little success, to make a group of young boys throwing rocks at each other not be a vicious gang. They think he's interesting because holy is different and not something you see everyday.

The rage and the holiness are out there for anyone around to see. Those who see become the immediate "we" who knows about those instances of rage, of holiness. The buildup of the various "we" witnesses remembering and talking to each other becomes the "we" that knows.

Maybe the teller of "Notes from Underground," feels underground in the city because he can't feel a "we" he understands to rise to and to join.

Sometimes I wander into spaces of the older "we," and it's weird there. It's small.

People there think they are high and lifted up and see far and know much. To me, it seems like they are sunk in a hole they can't see out of.

We knew we knew. We didn't know.

We, a bigger we, knows a lot, knows more than it knows it knows because it hasn't been talking with itself very well.

Living in the bigger we is full of surprises. You don't have to be afraid of looking like a fool when you are living in a large and accurate we. You will feel like a fool, and look it, too.

There's so much you don't know that other parts of we know top to bottom round and round. Learn what you can learn in the moment, notice more about that same moment later, when you're less embarassed, and twirl with the whole planet as it is, as we are.

Total dependence, then less dependence. Belly button, for a start.

The cargo of wanting to make every place we like a place where a car can go is heavy and widely weighs us down, flattens many experiences.

A slightly crumpled up piece of paper like a charge slip, only blank, floating above the racks of clothes. Looking like a not very organized bit of origami, flying quiet like it seems that origami birds want to, it stays impossibly aloft and says to the people turning through the clothes on the clothes racks and clothes shelves, "You can change another way, and really change." No one looks up. They're looking at the clothes and inside pictures of themselves. Now and then, someone hears.

Sometimes, the news is of real interest.

Sometimes, I need to forget the news system and know what I actually personally know and know it well.

The world is strange and wonderful and strange.

The wind when it doesn't stop is like the turning of the planet, which also does not stop.

Ocean, ocean, this ice, that ice--which way am I walking?

Rural people are keepers of the stars.

What would Gandhi say? "Chill!" Pray and think. Thinkpray.

They keep saying it's going to rain, and I keep thinking it hasn't rained. I walk out in the morning to wet sidewalks, which here can come from fog or rain. I feel a few stray raindrops as I walk around, but I don't think it's rained. Then, I go to the nearest park and see plants like mushrooms, but with no visible stem, and the caps of two of them each as big as a dinner plate. They are having the precipitation experience.

Quaint saint ain't paint. Her surprising actions while living made there be more surprising actions which led to more actions right now, startling in their creative, non-conforming goodness.

The manila cardstock bus transfer shining back at the morning sun is beautiful because I'm with you.

This is good. This is happening in a way that is different than what I would have made up. I always suspected that I wasn't God.

We can turn these trees into money, but we can't turn this money into air.

Say repeatedly the words that are the goal, such as, "Down" or "Up" or "On and on."

God doesn't need fanaticism.

A person who personifies a group that you are part of whether you want to be or not is focusing intently on you and saying, "I want you to make something new that I may not like at first but will like later when it helps our group and the big group a lot. Think. Sing til you blurt it out. Doodle til you draw it from reality as reality is now to be a better new reality." I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Midwives do it gently."

copyright 2010 Anne Herbert All rights reserved