Lottery lore; Anniversary of the atomic bomb; Shamanic vs group-based religious rites; Unstructured time; Samsara...

As far as I understand, profits from Ontario lotteries goes to fund programs in sports, recreation, culture, the arts, education, health care, the environment, charities, as well as gambling addiction programs. If I discover this not to be the case I would, of course, stop buying tickets when I occasionally do. When I've succumbed and bought a ticket, I've never felt that it was money wasted: half of it goes to winners, a tiny bit to administration, and almost half to the wide variety of programs I've mentioned, many of which would cease to exist without this funding.

Nah, I wasn't 'bargaining,' just usually I never buy a ticket when the prize is that big because I wouldn't want the responsibility of all that money, nor the publicity. Still, buying a $2. ticket, even with no odds at all, one needs to be prepared, just in case... Zimbabwe is my mother country, and the country is in tragic condition, that's why a foundation to Feed the Children of Zimbabwe rather than something in Canada, which is in much better shape.
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Noone understands the atomic bomb like the Japanese do. I bow in sorrow and remembrance.

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"In plant-based groups the focus is on the group; whereas, in hunting-based ones the focus is on the individual. Of the former, we find group-based religious rites; in the latter, there is a focus on unique vision. The shaman, usually an odd and feared person in a farming-based society, is central to hunting and gathering tribes."

I wrote that 21 years ago. I wonder if it's at all 'provable.' Interesting concepts...

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With my daughter mostly away, and not working outside the home at present, and crazy menopausal sleep cycles, and a ton of sorting to do, I've decided to "unstructure" myself. I hereby release myself from having to conform to any schedule at all. I'll sleep when I feel like it, get up when I feel like it, write when I want, meditate when I want, paint if I want, eat whenever I feel like it, take the dog out whenever, and try to sort out the mess in this over-crowded space as whim moves me. So far, it's working - I did all the dishes and cleaned without feeling guilty or forced. None of it is hard to do, I don't know why I tend to make it so.

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I saw Nalin Pan's film, Samsara, last night... and it continues to play in my consciousness. The landscapes and extraordinary architecture, the ritual objects, the clothing, the beauty of the people, the innocence of such simple decisions. I may try to write more later on this film...


tecnorati tags: lottery, anniversary of atomic bomb, shamans, unstructured time, samsara.

All because of last night's lottery...

Woke too early and sat, my futon couch propped at one end, chaise lounge style, bolstered with pillows, staring out the window. For hours. At noon I meditated, clearing my mind, and lay flat and came to around 2pm, forced myself up and into a shower. I just accidentally broke a 4-cup Pyrex measurer, hundreds of pieces of thick glass on the tile floor, it seems to be almost a safety glass, which was when I realized I was having a bad day.

It's all because of last night's lottery. It was a 22 million jackpot. I was out shopping on one of my 3 hour walks, my grocery cart heavy, when I gave in and stopped at a small convenience store and bought a ticket. I scratched the numbers without reading glasses so I couldn't see what I was doing. On the radio in the store was a play about a woman being informed by the police that her husband died of a heart attack, and I heard the actress gasp, and start talking about how he always took his pills.

From the moment of the purchase of the ticket, my mind went on one of its jaunts. That's a lot of money. What would I do with it? It's well beyond my need for a house or some stable income. Okay, I'd buy a house, set up some funds for myself and my kids, give some to family and a couple of hard up artists, and then what. What charity would I give to? Or would I set up my own charity? Knowing me, it'd be the latter. And what?

The children of Zimbabwe. I'd set up a charity to feed the children of Zimbabwe.

That decided, I began planning it. Picking up the cheque at Lottery Canada, dealing with the publicity, which would be most difficult. We'd have to move that day. Hide. Go undercover. I might have to close all my websites. We'd be looking for a house; we'd take a vacation (I haven't had one of those since 1989, not an official one with no cooking or cleaning, meaning I'm not counting my cottage when I still had one). Then the work would begin, interviewing investment firms, seeking out the best, most honest lawyer and accountant, researching the setting up of a charitable foundation, talking to many people, including government, and then picking an investment route, incorporating a name, setting up an office perhaps in my new house. Meanwhile, contacts with any organizations who attempt to bring aid to Zimbabwe would be ongoing as I learnt all I could about going below the radar of sanctions to deliver aid to those who most need it.

Since the country is bankrupt, corruption would be high on my list of problems to deal with. Corruption, and distribution - it's become a police state. Feeding the children means feeding their families. Feeding the children means making lifesaving drugs available with trained medical personnel. Feeding the children means bringing in teachers to teach school, and farming methods, and other sustenance-producing ventures. Instead of tobacco farming, which was Zimbabwe's mainstay before Mugabe kicked out the largely white farmers, I'd encourage perhaps cotton and hemp farming and the production of textiles - the traditional patterns of the fabrics amazing enough surely to sustain an economy, but they could be major producers of fabric for the fashions of the Western world; why not? A much healthier alternative to tobacco, which will cause an estimated billion deaths worldwide by 2050.

But I'd have to deal with a paranoid, arrogant and utterly corrupt man, probably at his multimillion dollar retirement hotel outside of Harare, a man who was originally Marxist, who was probably brilliant, and who has sent his country into ruin: Mugabe. I've been imagining myself talking to him, how the relationship would be. How I'd tell him I didn't give a damn about the politics of the situation, or sanctions, or the European Union, or the United Nations, that there's a crisis and the children are going hungry. That he must let me in to feed the children, and their families, and bring in teachers, and create a new African economy that is self-sustaining. And then I start designing the bulletproof vest that I'd have to wear at all times; even as I ask for assurances of safety, I know that every time I leave for a trip 'back home' - I was born in Zimbabwe, even if my family left when I was two, it doesn't matter, some things run very deep - my own children might not see me again. And of course, I was thinking about publicity, projections on how I'd deal with that. And how I'd have to find someone to run this charity who was not only a good person with their heart in the right place, lots of experience in international charity organizations, but who would have extraordinary mediation skills, something I lack.

Perhaps I should rip up the lottery ticket for its senseless and false dreams of hope without checking the numbers. Every time I buy a ticket, I feel like the matchstick girl in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. For the day or so before the draw, I get to see a world a little better, in a different light, but then the flame goes out.


tags: Zimbabwe, charitable organizations, Feed the Children, lottery, having a bad day, Hans Christian Anderson's Matchstick Girl.

Flush of Air

Flush of air reflushing itself. The concrete that girders strains under its own pressure and sings in a flatulent tone. A ceaseless rush like a hum. It is everywhere in the building, the offices, the hallways, the bathrooms, even the elevators with their pneumatic brakes. One day these towers will fill other planets, the moon, Mars, over on Alpha Centauri, and they won't smell or sound any different. When the world got translated into numbers it became money. It's the future of mankind, man.

tags: office worker, financial district, climate-controlled buildings, populating other planets.

The Nectarine

Are the day's edges golden
curving in to red
at the centre?

On this pressingly hot day I amble
down the long city block trailing my cart for
oranges, bananas, strawberries, apples,
green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, onions, mushrooms, carrots;
without a penknife, I pass the mangos, squeezing
the nectarines, red
almost brownish, brushed with bruised
colour like a Cezanne painted
from the inside out, the pulp held
intact with a peel
of sunset hues, outlined with dark scent.
Oh, promises, but I expect a flavourless,
crunchy thing like an apple, like all the other
nectarines the past few years.

Starting back, dragging the cart, I stop under
the shade of a maple, slip my hand
into the cart and pull out
the nectarine,
never mind if it isn't washed,
rubbing it on my blue-hued sarong,
I bite.

Honeyed.
Drippingly honeyed. Juicy and rich,
the colour of a ripened sun sinking on the horizon,
massaging my tongue with ecstasies, covering
my nose, cheeks, chin with a delicate
layer of nectarine syrup
that I wipe on my hands and both arms
until I am a sticky, scented fruit flower for
bees. Eating
such a ripe
and succulent nectarine
in public is practically pornographic, so
flagrantly sensuous and delicious.

When you thought you were
going to satisfy your craving
with an unripe pretense
of soft flesh,
a rich medley
of juices
burst
into
your
hot
mouth.

And then you just wanted to drop
your cart and run back
to the little Chinese grocer's
and buy the whole bushel.

Instead you went
to the supermarket
and bought milk and yogurt and bottled water.

But you had your moment.

------
Note: This is an edit of an earlier posting.

tecnorati tags: poetry, nectarines, Cezanne, fruit.

Her eyes are smoky, dark...

Her eyes are smoky, dark. It is as if clouds swirl over the moon. I see flashes of an unusually high intelligence, even across the train where I stand holding a pole swaying to the motions of gliding and stopping. She reaches down and slips a sheaf of papers into a large lawyer's briefcase that has wheels. Her ring finger is studded with diamonds that shimmer in the underground light. When she stands in her ruffled short black skirt and pressed white suit jacket, of a nylon and satin blend, she looks diminutive, her blonde hair tied back, perhaps sprayed into place, preparations of a night's intense research filling her mind. The sense of an obscuring moontide about her that originally drew my attention disappears. I see her pull herself straight; breathing confidence into her gait, she steps off the train on her way to a fierce day at court.


(Note: these little pieces started with qarrtsiluni's current short shorts, and then I read somewhere of an author who writes books sentence by sentence, spending sometimes an hour on each, but never revises afterwards, and I thought, one sentence a day, I can do that. They grow a little - it's fun.)

Sultry Dark Air

These little lyrical pieces in the first person continue (one sentence a day, I can do it, I can do it, and it expands too)... with apologies to those of you who find the heat unbearable :) I have enough of these small prose poems for a suite now and I'll try to do a reading over the weekend and post it for you.


Heat presses like a great Turkish steam bath. I lie on my back contemplating hotness; on sand yellow cotton sheets, the soft aquamarine silky nightdress a wave that partially covers me. Soaking in warmth without resistance, so unlike the rigid response to the cold Winter air when I am retracted, conserving heat. This is the season that I await, these are the nights that I await; the air thick with the steam of a sweat lodge, I sprawl open, the incalescence that pervades the air an insistent masseuse. Breathing the torridity, the loves of my life flicker like heat lightning in a slideshow of memories that reach into the past, and in the deep and fragile night, smiling, my glowing heart, my sighs join the sultry air.

technorati Profile: technorati tags: heatwave, massage, deep relaxation, healing, loves of one’s life, heat lightning, gratitude

Without a Guide

I dive. Into a moat of possibilities, primal soup of beginnings, where things are disjointed, undefined. A flux of moments not yet become time, flotsam on the edge of becoming, half-formed bits of genetic material seeking connections, a way to complete what is only dimmly begun. It is dark, watery, and things fly at me, scraps of detritus that perhaps I could make sense of if I knew the design. Do flowing magnetic waves draw disparate things into new configurations? In this place without rationality that I have so dangerously found myself in, how are things connected, and through connection, created?

technorati Profile: technorati tags: origins , shamanic journey , primal beginnings, manifesting, creativity, creation of life , becoming.