In weather words, "heavy at times" implies "not so heavy at times." Wait to make your moves for a relative easing, which will come.

Walking in the rain, I see all these short, straight grey lines around me of falling water. Later, I fold up my umbrella, and the lines have become round dots on the fabric or irregular splotches with rounded edges, on their way to becoming tiny parts of the air invisible to me as the umbrella dries in the corner.

Water doesn't get bent out of shape about what shape it's in.

It does look like it, in a big way. But it seems unfair to call the visual part of a nuclear explosion a mushroom cloud. Mushrooms are willing to be subtle. Humans can cometimes look right at them and not see them.

Mushroom clouds aren't like that. And even after they become no longer unavoidably seen by the naked eye, they are like the pushy salesman of death, the nightmare that keeps on giving.

I met a woman who was active in Japan against nuclear power, a tough gig for a Japanese person. She got into it because when she was little she was sick a lot and in the hospital a lot. Her sickness was related to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but she was born maybe ten years after they were dropped.

When she was in the hospital she noticed that there were many, many more people suffering from the effects of radiation than was publically admitted, an expotential lie. So later, when they told her about the need for nuclear power and how the dangers were well dealt with, she did her own research and own thinking, and active she became.

Mushrooms will poison you, some of them, but you have to eat them for that to happen. Robert Oppenheimer loved the beauty of the desert so that's one reason the research for and first test of the US A-bomb that Oppenheimer was the scientific leader of happened in beautiful New Mexico. People downwind of that did not make a conscious choice to eat the mushroom, but it came to them, and sometimes it killed them, as they lived near the desert Oppenheimer found so beatiful

Eat Earth heart til it's gone, then calculate how we're going to live.

Maxine Hong Kingston wrote in a essay on language about a time when she ran into her aunt in Chinatown. She knew her aunt worked as a maid at a downtown hotel and Kingston used the Ehglish word "maid" which her aunt didn't hear. "If you don't know the word, you don't here the word," wrote Kingston. I keep thinking that explains a lot.

A friend of mine who started out as an education reformer said that most people have never even been near, much less in, a truly good school.

Denali, Fuji, and Olympus haven't met. They keep in touch through the crust they are sharing, through the crust they have done their part to make.

On a wide sidewalk that I walk on almost daily, off to the side near the curb, I've noticed five bricks lying haphazardly near each other.

The bricks are flatter and wider that the average brick, perhaps intended for paving. They've been lying there for at least one trip through the moon's phases, maybe more.

This morning, they are up and at 'em.

Someone has made them be a bit of Stonehenge. Three standing on end, two laid across those three, and suddenly I'm looking down and seeing part of Stonehenge as I've seen it in aerial photographs. I'm thinking around the curve of the globe and back in time. However, those folks back then over there moved the Stonehenge stones and decided where to place them, it was awesome that they could and typically human that they wanted to.

Someone at play, yesterday or early today, helps me wake up bigger.

Gardeners tend to happiness.

If they are not, at the moment, happy in their official, famous life, they can start hanging out with the plants they care for, and, hey, presto, they are happy.

I feel like the most grounded words I've read on global warming are from Robin Land Fox, who writes about gardening in the weekend "Financial Times" newspaper.

While he's writing about the theme of the week--bulb plants, catalogs, etc.--he will matter-of-factly not that England, where he gardens, is having longer growing seasons, warmer weather, more gardening possibilities. Not a whiff of the dire "what if?" common in global warming writing, but straightforward statements that for English gardeners the situation has changed for the more. He's happy.

The yellow wall along the sidewalk on 18th Avenue is next to the playground of Jefferson School, elementary. The sun adorned it pretty good today, and it was also adorned by the jiggle-joggle sound of children playing fairly happily on the other side of the playground.

Walk a little further, and there are yellow flowers, a brighter yellow, in land connected to the library.

The public sector with a certain amount of style, and help from our neighborhood star.

Get on that bus. Don't wait for a limo.

Sometimes when I am constructing one of those imaginary conversations where I point out that the other person is totally wrong and I am sharp-tongued about it, and the other person can only agree and doesn't sharp-tonguedly attack my faults--sometimes when I am constructing an extremely imaginary conversation like that, I stop and try to imagine a galaxy in my throat with its light, its dark, its distances.

I can't even begin to imagine it well, but it's like back to basics, doing scales. What matters?

Since I get to live in a galaxy, I could lighten up.

The jewel that looks like an egg actually is an egg and will hatch. Let the idea of the jewel go, and help the gawky young one learn to live.

May I oversimplify you for my own convenience? I have got this story of the world going, and you don't fit. It seems simpler to grind you flatter than to rethink my story for the sake of mere accuracy.

Today seems like the right day, and then it is followed by another today, that seems like the right day.

The wise women did not arrive because they were already there--helping, preventing problems, making the situation unnecessarily pleasant.

A lack of curiosity carefully designed to preserve the illusion of knowing something.

The icy regions are de-icing and becoming differently valuable. We might need an International Court of Thaw.

The crummy weather, the inconvenient weather, the weather that keeps us alive.

Compared to here, wisdom would be slower.

Toward the top of North American is St. John's, Nova Scotia, Canada. Toward the bottom of North America is San Juan, Costa Rica. The city names refer to the same guy, who was neither John nor Juan. He may have been holy. These things happen. God only knows what he would have thought of this continent. I wonder if some people think North American doesn't exist because people in the Bible didn't know about it.

Now that it's being the thing it is, it's much more slow. Because it's there and doesn't need to rush to get there.

I think there is a relationship between how war happens and how letting bad moods rip happens, in which case I've got a chance to do some very local anti-war work.

I get closer to understand what Paul Reps meant when he wrote, "Drinking a bowl of green tea, I stop the war."

The wall isn't made of lies. It is made of us believing the lies/

I am visually oriented, but I often don't look at what's in front of me because I so want to preserve the picture I have in my brain.