my sign is vital, my hands are cold

for virgo: In 2009, you'll receive a lot of help, some unexpected, whenever you phase out your trivial desires so that you can better pursue your truly important desires. The coming months will also be an excellent time to shed unrealistic fantasies so you can be freer to concentrate on the realistic kind. While these are not quite once-in-a lifetime opportunities, Virgo, they may be the once-in-a-decade variety. Why not draw up a plan for how you can take maximum advantage of the specific luck that will be flowing your way?

Jonna Lee: Human (The Killers)

In order to overcome selfishness, it is necessary to be daring . . . We are attracted to our cocoons, our selfishness, and we are afraid of selflessness, stepping beyond ourselves. So in order to overcome our hesitation, some kind of leap is necessary.

In the practice of meditation, the way to be daring, the way to leap, is to disown your thoughts, to step beyond your hope and fear . . . When you let yourself go in that way, you develop trust in the strength of your being and trust in your ability to be open and extend yourself to others.

But then, once you have made a leap of daring, you might become arrogant. You might say to yourself: “Look, I have jumped! I am so great, so fantastic!” But arrogant warriorship does not work. It does nothing. . . The warrior who has accomplished true renunciation is completely naked and raw, without even skin or tissue. He has renounced putting on a new suit of armor or growing a thick skin, so his bone and marrow are exposed to the world. He has no room and no desire to manipulate situations. He is able to be, quite fearlessly, what he is.

At this point, paradoxically, the warrior finds himself more alone. The fullness of his experience is his own, and he must live with his own truth. Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and lonliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out and help others . . . The warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart.

--Chogyam Trungpa, Shambala: The Scared Path of the Warrior

----------------

I almost blew by this, but then listened once more, then again - it's strangely addictive, an old folkgospel lament with a woman's spokenword assessment of the singer's faith overlaid on top of it - by the 10th time I'd listened to it, I lovedloved it:

Fred Eaglesmith - Tinderbox: Worked Up Field [moteldemoka year in indie ablums review for more]

I’m kneeling at the edge of a worked up field praying for the rain to fall

I’m kneeling at the edge of a worked up field praying for the rain to fall

I pray and pray and pray all day

But it don’t rain at all [overlay: he just wants stuff / it's not realistic / passion for trains is nice] ~ Fred Eaglesmith / Worked Up Field ~ "

57. Nine Women Arrested After Oral Sex Competition In July, nine British women were arrested for participating in an oral sex contest on the Greek island of Zakynthos. Each was charged with prostitution, and the male parts of the equation were hit with encouraging obscene behavior. "I didn't realize AWESOME was illegal," . . .

Reflection: Wait a minute, they arrest people in Greece for consensual oral sex?? No wonder the place has been breaking out in riots, everybody's got a headache. [the rest - slapstick slays me, an embarrassing weakness]

(horoscope)FORECAST FOR THE WEEK AHEAD: Is it possible to be extremely moderate? As any jumbo shrimp lover can attest, just because it’s an oxymoron doesn’t make it a bad idea. The preponderance of Capricorn energy suggests that excessively temperate behavior will lead to (whatthehellever I'm not even gonna finish reading that)

Eddie Vedder & Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn - The long road [one of my new years resolutions: never post any song that falls below the high rec line]

update: the weather here is sublime, 70 mph wind gusts blowing the power out off-n-on but also blowing wet air in off Lake Ontario and I'm watching it out my front window and it looks like I'm at the top of the world where sky and earth are on top of each other . . . if only my car weren't trapped inside my garage w the opener going weirdo-reset-No-somethingsomething, hmmmm

dhyaanaynaatmani pashyanti kaychidaatmaanama atmanaa

Took 3 days going in snowed-in-airport circles to get there, and thus all that effort was for one single day - but what I wanted for xmas (snow or no snow, 600 miles or not) was her "AHTY GINAH!!", and I got it as she danced on her toes to get picked up. (It's been almost exactly a year since Doug's passing too, btw. For xmas G'ma wanted my "GRANDMA!!", and she got it.)

say my name cuddletantra playlist:
eels-jelly dancers [weirdly groovy]
DJ Shadow - Fixed Income (Remix)

J.J. Cale - Cherry

Caetano Veloso - Maria Bethania

Jeff Bennett’s Lounge Experience - Dreams

thievery corp (w sue jorge) - hare krisna [my pick]

give me things that don't get lost

lizz wright - old man (neil young) [my pick,lovelovethis]
runners up, all superduperhigh rec, so merry xmas:
The Be Good Tanyas: When Doves Cry (Prince)
adele - melt my heart to stone kickdrums remix
Joan Osborne: The Weight (ccr)
clem snide - a ballad of bitter honey
Mark Kozelek: Up To My Neck In You (AC/DC)
The Lucksmiths - A Sobering Thought just when one was needed la la la
brent amaker and the rodeo - girls are good for lots of things

joni mitchell - river
lex land - river (joni mitchell cover)

for Virgo: "My deepest emotional wound has also been the source of inexhaustible blessings." I'm not going to tell you why that statement is true for me -- it's way too personal -- but I assure you that it's one of the fundamental facts about my destiny. Could you make a similar assertion, Virgo? Is it possible to interpret your life in such a way that you could see how a painful experience you suffered in the past has also given you tremendous insight, inspiration, and vitality? Two thousand nine will be an excellent year to make that leap of understanding. And the time around the solstice -- right now! -- is a perfect moment to get started.

It’s winter solstice today, at 5:25 eastern time to be specific. Spells you cast tonight will begin something new that will be bud out in the spring and flower this coming summer, so they say. What do you want to start? Think hard and pick a single word for it. Write that on a piece of paper, light the paper with the flame of a candle and let it burn down in a metal bowl or pot and then scatter the ashes to the wind while you let the candle burn the rest of the night. [Enjoy the company of friends (if you have any), and eat some chickpeas.]

The Maniacs - Heart of Gold


I got Ears a baby electric guitar for xmas from TonyPetrocelli (one word), ie Lewiston Music Guy (LMG), complete w amplifier etc etc and forthcoming lessons. Priest-musicians are a double whammy, but from a maternal point of view I can’t think of many turn-outs that would make me happier. Every time I see LMG, clearly very grounded on his Mt Aloof, it strikes me again how useful it is in a human life to have foundational alter-identities. That way when you get to those (inevitable) moments when you think “if I have to live this life this way one more day I’m going to blow my damn head off using my toe and a rocket launcher” you can quit whatever that life is/was and still have one within yourself, a talent in the shape of a person you can always retreat to and be. I’m tempting Ears to build such a one within himself, using “Guitar Hero” as the lure.

"Awake My Soul," Mumford & Sons

my Xmas karma: my roof is kinda caving in under the weight of so much snow, leaking all over the place through my woodbeam ceiling; at the brink of despair, I’m shoveling the driveway after shoveling the roof (for 2 solid hours) when a stranger pulls up in a truck and plows me out totally, “merry xmas” then drives off; I lost $100, just fell outa my bag who knows where; I got a letter in the mail today from Nun telling me that she’s “adjusting my income” up 4% because I’m underpaid, “merry xmas“; I’m outa food and drinking my last glass of wine; so I’m hoping any minute now some priest dude will show up on snow shoes outa the blizzard with a 6-pack and a pizza . . . .


watson twins - sky open up

gumby dharma



(ok but gumby is wayy dulll, no? snowed in watching gumby on youtube is kinda lite torture. TJ says, after about half a dozen episodes on my laptop with the covers of my bed all tucked around him, "this isn't terrible but it's very cliche". he meant gumby, but ya)



meanwhile, I'm still juicing the national optimism fruit, but someone should tell the new prez that his inclusion-mojo can safely stop short of culture-war assholes >:/

the blind boys of alabama w/ solomon burke - i pray on christmas
kay starr - i've got my love to keep me warm (stuhr remix) love this
the staple singers - who took the merry out of christmas?
james brown - santa claus go straight to the ghetto
the weepies - all that i want (repost)
clarence carter - back door santa
keb mo - jingle bell jamboree
pearl jam - santa god
stephen colbert & elvis costello - there are much worse things to believe in
aretha franklin - joy to the world (she's so hot)
half man half biscuit - it's cliched to be cynical at christmas
emmylou harris - light of the stable
black lips - christmas in baghdad
okkervil river - listening to otis redding at home during christmas
antsy mcclain - she's underneath the mistletoe again
belle & sebastian - are you coming over for christmas?

debrief v.2 [4 a.m. meditation episode 1] - I’m camping out at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, surrounded by the elements of wellness. But one thing: I feel unable to save my soul from the dark-matter shape of a perpetual absence, a Negative Space in his shape that is here sleeping next to me, having mass made of “No”.

IPG (Intense Priest Guy) is sitting there in his dhoti, picking at the toes of his sweat socks. He’s completely absorbed in what he’s talking about. The most attractive woman (a perfectly quaffed ‘I glow from within’ brunette, who was flirting with him the night before and of whom he said in response ‘I bet you’re Russian’) in the room asks, “What do Hindus think about dinosaurs?“ We’ve already discussed that the mind and body aren’t real, so on his unreal face some unreal annoyance passes like the back of a whale and then submerges behind his unreal effort to imagine what the hell dinosaurs might have to do with anything. He says “no no that’s a good question” but it’s just that he’s only qualified to explain the TEXT, not to apply it to paleontology which is simply not his AREA; No hard feelings.

In this vignette, I see the shape of my problem. I’m attracted to priests [and nuns, come to think of it], to men for whom what is internal to them is much more present than I could ever be. And I attract priests [and nuns], I’m not sure why/how. One thing leads to another, I say “can I ask a question?“ and he replies “you're not my area [ft. fuck you]” (passive or active aggression). IPG mentioned a daughter, has a tattoo on his ring finger so some kind of mate . . . Believe it or not, I almost asked him. I mean, after the dinosaur thing how could I do worse? I almost asked him, “How do you and yours communicate across the divide of matter and anti-matter?” But I didn’t have the guts.

The Priestess And The Fool - Baby, It's Cold Outside - this is awesome, horns at 3:39

om namoh bhagavate vasudevaya

seminar debrief : What you're trying to accomplish when meditating is seeing everything from your soul’s point of view rather than from that of your mind-body. If you believe in the spiritual framework, then yoga/meditation automatically improves your karma and increases the chance of an auspicious rebirth (into a family of yogis, or to put it more bluntly “into a family that promotes rather than impedes your progress toward Enlightenment”). If you don’t believe/invest in the spiritual framework, well then you just get better health. There's no downside so you can’t 'fail' at meditating and thus you can’t fail in any one episode of attempting to do so, even episode after episode.

Ok, so first of all. Imagine your soul is at the center and around it is your mind/body like a jewelcase. Your immediate goal in meditating (and in the other methods of yoga, such as intense study like the gita line-by-line for instance) is to make little impressions/dents/holes in that case called samscaras. Through these holes, the soul can See better. Without samscara, your mind/body will entomb your soul and in total ignorance it will be trapped, suffering your stupidity (in this life and the next ones ad infinitum) – so the point of meditating is the same as living an examined life, basically. BaleD, in another context of discussion altogether, described this as reverse-blinking. You feel like your eyes are open all the time, but they’re not really. Occasionally they will open and you’ll be like HOLY SHIT I SEE CLEARLY for a second, then they close again. That second of clarity is a samscara.

When we got to the Bhakti part of the text (meditating all the time on God), Intense Guy got into the methodology a little as he’s a Bhakti-Yogi: Always meditate in the same place, so that place has no other associations – i.e. manage the phychic secretion(s) factor of your surroundings . You’re supposed to look at your nose so you can't look at anything else. He confessed that he doesn’t do that and most people don’t because crossing your eyes non-stop is very uncomfortable – I wanted to ask what he does look at, since he said that closing your eyes will make you sleepy and that’s not good, but I didn’t have the guts (aside: bc of course I was crushed out on him by this time even though I was trying to overcome my doglike-tailwagging-at-the-priest instincts, especially as I was sitting next to the French yogi for whom celibacy was only ever a metaphorical concept obviously, but to no avail and when Intense Priest Guy told the story of Indra's curse and self-consciously said the word 'vagina' like 'vagina' I was a goner and thus struck dumb [selfannoyedsigh, say la vee]). So if you get sleepy w your eyes closed, try a blank wall I guess. Sit w your spine like a rod and your ass like the base of that lightening conductor a few inches off the ground and your legs on the ground in front of you, like this

Concentrate on a mantra (you’re supposed to get this from your guru but if you don’t have one then use a generic) because it is impossible to truly empty the mind and thus you give it one single thing to hold itself up with and then it can find the power over time to empty of itself of everything else – you can chant it, or repeat it internally (or beginners can listen to one w/ headphones, which is what I'm doing). And if at all possible, meditate first thing in the morning rather than at night because during the day the mind fills with shit and thus it’s harder for it to empty – 4 a.m. is the most auspicious hour from some astrological-spiritual point of view that is still unclear to me. (But if you're French, 11 a.m. is early enough fyi.)

here's an om [link removed]

for VIRGO : Your nervous system has been delicate and physical exertion takes the edge off. Recreation is important and you’ll have playful company to join you in your favorite activities. [ha - yeah virgo strikes again w her idea of a good time, so everybody sit and think some shit about your soul! woohoo!]

Just like dodgeball only reversed. When I was a little girl, I fantasized endlessly of the day that the dodgeballers might become the dodgeballees, and the bullies and 'popular people' would be pelted to death with those red gym balls.

for virgo today: VIRGO When you apply yourself to a job, even one that exceeds your known ability, it somehow always gets done. Remember your past successes and go forward. You are a channel for powers beyond your own.

I'm taking a seminar on the bhagava gita so I can manifest some yogini truth consciousness. This guy in person is pretty hot -INTENSE. Which is weirdly consistent, that these dawgs who are deep into The Big Chill(s) are as;ldkgja;dlkgja;dsl kinda nerve wrackingly stimulating almost (because I'm vata [the yogini personality type equivalent of hysteric] so I don't have any phlegm [which sounds good, but no actually] so nearly every/anything could make me bonkerinos unless in small well-cooked doses). (And these yogis don't come in small doses, seems like.)

What's your dosha (test)?

. . . driving through snow, as I had done for a total of 200 miles today, in a kind of lite trance as I had been from the monotony, something was happening around me that I hadn’t been paying direct attention to and as soon as I noticed it, I looked in front of me and there was a tornado wall, it was forming around me, and in front of me was the western wall of it and I saw (for just a second) a patch of clear brilliant blue sky (what is always right behind such a wall, almost unimaginably but it’s right there) and then it was closed over by that wall - I watched the wall go up and right and then it was too big to see the shape of as it went deosil and then behind me, and I was at the eye of that storm as at the edges it started to rip into the air all that it was touching. I closed my eyes in the dream and took my foot off the gas and felt myself come to a stop just as I also felt the car moving as maybe through the air but I didn’t look I just prayed, please please I want to be with my children please if I have to die send me directly to them and I started to list the people I love but knew there might not be time to make the list so I prayed myself into the list and myself/list written onto the wall of the storm directly with everything I could bring to the prayer against the wall of panic in my gut rising to meet the storm. I opened my eyes in the dream and I hadn’t moved - all around me cars and trees whatnot were every which way (though nobody seemed hurt, no injuries/wailing etc) in a perfect circle surprisingly small bc I could also see beyond that circle where the strip malls were untouched, as if the tornado at its eye had been almost exactly the size I could look at, say while driving . . . . Looking up at the sky to see if it was blue was the same thing as waking up, which I did with my heart pounding in my throat so hard that it was behind my face.

I don’t dream all that much. I mean, I remember the salamanders cz it’s not every day I have a dream. And never like that. Ummm (still shakey, holy fuck man), welp:

The individual and collective problems and dilemmas we face at the end of the 20th century are all, in a very real way, the consequence of incomplete (still evolving) conscious awareness. I am increasingly convinced that it is the huge disparity between our immensely sophisticated knowledge about how to manipulate the physical world, (skills which we inevitably try to use to satisfy the incoherent jumble of our less-than-conscious desires), in contrast with our almost total lack of reliable self-knowledge about the deeper structures of our interior lives, which is the main cause of the terrible situation(s) we find ourselves in at this perilous historical moment.
In the dream world, "wind & water" have been archetypal symbols of spirit ("which bloweth where it listeth") and emotion, (which "runs deep", even when it's still) for thousands (if not millions) of years. In the waking world, peoples from all over the planet share stories where the "voice of the God(s)" "speaks from out of the whirlwind". Non-technological peoples, (including the vast majority our own ancestors, back to the Old Stone Age an beyond), have viewed the "tornado" as "the finger of God", which points with precision and unparalleled power to the psycho-spiritual mysteries of guilt and hidden meaning. Like the imagined "Hand of God", the tornado demonstrates breath taking power, and leaves one life relatively untouched, while the life standing directly next to it is totally torn and shattered forever.
Each time we dream of "tornadoes", these ancient, collective layers of symbolic association reveal themselves anew. Each "dream tornado" is, at some level, a harbinger of change, in the psyche as well as the waking world. Although only the dreamer can say for sure what his or her dream images mean, dream "tornadoes" are compelling metaphors of the individual and collective social change that we "feel", (that we know in our secret heart of hearts), is necessary , and is coming. We intuit, as dreamers, that ultimately the "power of this impending storm" is not just a consequence of incomplete human consciousness and planning failure alone. The forces of change are also "forces of nature" - "divine forces", like nature herself. The dream "tornado", over and over again, turns out to be symbol of the dreamer's own personal relationship to the deepest unasked and unanswered psycho-spiritual questions is his/her life, and these issues always have transpersonal implications as well.
Of course, these inevitable, unconscious, archetypal associations echo back "out" of the dream world into our perception of the changes in the global weather patterns that are the other main inspiration for these dreams. No matter what we think and believe consciously, our nagging fear that these "earth changes" are a "punishment" is an inevitable reflection of our realization that we are misusing the divine gift of increasingly conscious self awareness. This "theological" belief creeps into the emotional tone and rhetoric of our debates over controlling ozone-depleting emissions, and the destruction of planetary bio-diversity in the service of short-term economic gain. We know, from the same deep, unconscious place that the dreams come from, that these global, political, economic, ecological issues are ultimately "spiritual" - that these issues both shape and reflect our deepest relationships with the most important meanings of our individual and collective lives, (a situation which our ancestors have always equated with our relationship to "God" and "the Divine"...)
When such tornado dreams are remembered, it means that the dreamers are, in fact, equal to the psycho-spiritual tasks of increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance that the unknown frightening future demands, whether they feel or believe they are equal to these tasks, or not. ALL dreams come in the service of health & wholeness, and that means that NO dream, (even the dream of the 'terrifying tornado"), ever comes to say: "Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah - you have these problems and you can't do anything about them...!"
To have and remember such a dream is an invitation to the individual dreamer to search even more deeply within for the creative energies that are given shape in the "dream tornado" itself, for this image is, at another important level, a spontaneous symbolic meditation on the divine, as-yet unknown, unconscious creative energy that resides within each evolving human psyche.The dream tornado is an indication of the as-yet-unused-and only-intuited power of our own human ability to grow and change and evolve - the creative ability to change both ourselves and our planet in the process of our development. As long as such dreams continue to be remembered, there is every reason to believe that we can and will grow beyond even these "earth shaking" problems that our incomplete sorcerer's apprenticeship in consciousness itself have created. At this level, the "dream tornadoes" are a manifestation of that archetypal creative energy bubbling up in the collective psyche, asking for morally responsible creative expression in waking life.

for virgo this week: After meditating on how best to energize your love life, I decided to direct you to this passage from John Welwood's book Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart: "Everyone knows perfect love in their heart, for the human heart is a direct channel through which absolute love pours into this world. At the same time, human relationships are imperfect expressions of that love. This creates a painful gap between the perfect love we know in our hearts and the imperfect, incomplete ways it is expressed in our relationships. When we imagine that relative human love should be something it is not -- absolutely unconditional -- we suffer disappointment and wind up distrusting love itself. We also hold grievances against others for not loving us rightly or against ourselves for not having won that love. This gives rise to a universal human wound -- the sense of not feeling loved for who we are."

Mark Erelli w Jeffrey Foucault: Alright For Now (Tom Petty)

Norah Jones - Be here to love me (townes van zandt)

sara lov - my body is a cage (arcade fire)

i've had it to here being where love's a small word

chris bathgate - buffalo girl
crooked fingers - solitary man (neil diamond)
jennifer o'connor - a place in the sun (stevie wonder)
beth orton - wild world (cat stevens)
lex land - as much as you lead

been waiting for tomorrow all my life

Jacking the air conditioner and standing in front of it is one response to global warming, a response that solves the problem only for one person and only temporarily while it makes the underlying PROBLEM worse. What kind of a solution makes a problem worse? (Answer: A retarded one.) I mean, if you’re gonna DIE of the heat . . . But otherwise . . . . Retarded.

I believe that the planet is in the shape it is as a symptom of a single problem: people treat people (including themselves) like shit. We’re careless, short sighted, and gratuitously destructive of one another. We mistake pleasure for happiness and grab at immediate gratification instead of the more difficult process of investing in people, spiting our own contentment like hell. We throw each other away and ourselves away as if there’s an infinite supply of both. We say mean things, do mean things, and make ourselves feel powerful by putting other people asunder. Making someone else feel like shit is analogous to having dominion over them, and like baby goats we take other people to the alter of Ourselves and bleed them dry of their feeling for us. Sometimes the environment of this has made me literally sick. And then I thought I was going to die unless I got inside myself where it was cooler, where I could breathe.

This last weekend was the Buddha’s birthday - lots of meditation centers and yoga studios offering all-day sanctuary. I meditated on Unattachment. I can’t manage it because it is not at all the same thing as indifference. Indifference I can do, no problemo - just toggle the Prideful-Wrath mode and then you can go fuck yourself for all I care. Unattachment, on the other hand, is loving others without specific expectations of what you’re going to get out of that, including even the other person’s very existence - you look at others like “you are going to die (any second in the big scheme of things) so there’s no time to waste on anything but appreciating you as wholly as possible in this very moment, moment by moment to infinity”. Indifference by comparison is the equivalent of jacking the air conditioner and standing near it, a prisoner to the relief it provides. I’m trying really hard to not confuse the two, and to cultivate Unattachment . . . But honestly it’d be a lot easier if people would lay off spewing their dioxide producing cold air every which way, i.e. often in my fuckin’ face.

It’s Eid Ul-Adha today, which translates into something like “though it may seem like terrible sacrifice at first, the obedience to Love results in persons NOT getting their throats slit actually”. Go figure. I’m secularizing the concept and suggesting “International Try to Be Less of a Mindless Self-Centered Asshole Day”. I think that’s a great idea, while I’m unattached to its catching on I spose.

Will.I.Am - It’s a New Day super high rec - this is a fantastic song - and here's the video:

an angel will be with you shortly

Feist - Please Be Patient

Got slapped down so mean that I can’t seem to get back up. I keep trying but the ground has gone to ice slick permafrost beneath me in every direction. I just slip on it in my mind, falling down again and again with painful thuds until I’m going to break if I keep trying to stand. So I’ll lay here and maybe someone will find me. Or maybe I’ll drift off in the numb and fade to white blank as I blend in with the bitter cold, an inert thing amidst the frozen landscape, too small for a speed bump.

"Freedom," Jurassic 5