10 Are Dead in Minnesota After Rampage at School

What pain and anger can cause a child not just to fantasize darkly in desperate moments but to kill others on a calculated rampage? His grandparents. His fellow students. Himself. Perhaps revenge on a world of defeated dreams that never understood his depths of despair or the danger of his anger? The funerary dirge is of inconsolable loss, bewilderment at those who compose the school system who didn't see this dark and bloody volcano brewing, anger at the teen himself, for pelting his fury in deathly bullets extinguishing many lives in his wake, anger at our culture of anger, its endless portrayals of violent death on the news or movie screens, and sorrow, sorrow for the loss of so many young people, for the lives that they will never have.

In our culture of violence, with its readily available guns, what we most need to fear is ourselves, our neighbours, the breakdown of a fellow citizen who lives out the celluloid glory of infamy with terrifying impunity---such bullets tear through the reality of our lives.

My deepest condolences to all those of the Red Lake Indian Reservation who have lost loved ones in this tragedy.

HAPPY SPRING RAINBOW DAY!

I saw a rainbow today! And I came home and spoke for a good 5 minutes about it, recording, and you can go listen here:

Spring Rainbow: March 20/05, 5 min

It's an experiment in blathering on without writing first (ho hum de dum)! No poem, not yet....

"The Vision of Ezekiel," German, early 16th Century, Woodcut

One of my birth paintings...

SaucyVox.com

Go check this out. It's an on-line magazine published by the one and only, inimitable, brilliant, sensual and talented Feith:

SaucyVox has featured one of my birth paintings, Lace of Light (24"x37", watercolour on paper, 1987), on the cover of the current issue.

Now that I have procured a domain name, I shall be posting the entire series of Birth Paintings (1986-89) with writing to go with them as part of my book on the maternal body. I just need to watermark them, and then embark on the process of writing a first draft in my blog. So, that's coming....

On the life of a temp worker...

I've only taken 2 data entry jobs out of desperation ever. And I have discovered I go a little crazy doing them, and so will not accept anymore assignments like this again.

One was for the Real Estate Board, and they treated the team of us wonderfully with fresh coffee and a large tray of breakfast goodies every day, and an insistence on regular breaks, and they chatted with us at lunch, etc. It was a humanizing experience.

The company I left yesterday was the exact opposite.

While the women who I was helping were great, our 'supervisor' left much to be desired. She ordered us not to talk to each other when another temp was telling me that the bus she had been on the previous evening caught fire. She later took us into a private room and said we were not allowed to come in or leave even 5 minutes late or early, that we were being watched. When I finished a huge proof-reading/data entry job, the one I was 'hired' to do, and I did my portion in about a third of the time of everybody else's, and spot-checking my entries I didn't find a single mistake in my work, I went to the 'supervisor' and asked if I could leave. She said no, that the woman who I was helping still needed me. Then my temp agency found a receptionist/babysitting job at UBC for a day and a half, terrible pay, but an escape. I was told I couldn't leave, however.

Now I'm not a very good 'worker bee.' And I don't take kindly to being trapped. I began complaining to the folks sitting next to me about the "slave trade" of temp workers, how temp companies are like "pimps," how much money they make off us and how little they pay us, and the like, and whoever the 'mole' was, they ran upstairs and got the 'supervisor' who marched over to my desk and said, "You can leave now," and watched me pack up like she thought I would steal something, and when I asked why, she said, "You have a bad attitude." I could hardly stop smiling.

When am I going to write that article on temp jobs and the need for government regulation in this industry? I have discovered many of the companies that regularly use temps actually have a 'supervisor' who could be classified as an "authoritarian" personality and who takes pleasure in demeaning the women they have hired for "service." These 'supervisors' are also wasting huge amounts of their company's money with these hiring practices. But how else are they to dominate and humiliate workers without getting sued, fired or blacklisted?

Do I make it sound somewhat extreme? It isn't, believe me.

Why am I in this line of work in the first place? That's a long story. But one of my problems is that I get bored very quickly with monotonous work, and hence the variety of temp jobs suits me. I've worked all over Vancouver since I began this last September. The work I'm given, however, barely touches my skills, talents, education, ablilites, and I'm now looking at Government contract jobs that involve writing and web design, but how to break into that field?

Anyway, I must write an article on the life of the temp worker, though don't want to go about interviewing people (for obvious reasons), and wonder if I can write something very subjective - a first person account, an insider account - and sell it to a national newspaper? My main aim would be to shed light on this area of labour, and cause enough of an uproar to ultimately bring in government regulations so that people who are temping at least get a half decent cut of the salary paid for work that they do. Any thoughts anyone?

Earth Treasures

A Found Poem from Page 17 of Luminous Emptiness

Earth Treasures:

texts
sacred images
ritual instruments
medicinal substances

Treasures to be found in temples, monuments, statues, mountains, rocks, trees, lakes, even the sky.

Of the texts, occasionally they were full length, but usually fragmentary --- a word or two encoded in symbolic script which may change mysteriously once it has been transcribed.

The treasures hidden in the world are triggers to reach subtle levels of mind. When a treaure is found and reveals its essence, it unlocks understanding, or the natural energies of enlightenmnet that compose the mind, where the teachings have always been concealed.

____________________________

Aren't artists revealers of the treasures?














Francesca Fremantle, Luminous Emptiness (Shambhala, 2001). This story is about Padmasambhava who sought to preserve esoteric Tibetan Buddhist teachings for a safer time and so concealed them in the landscape, but perhaps we don't need an intercessory, surely the natural beauty and mystery of the world is treasure enough.

A wish...

The job, any job, holds itself as a tension in my life around which everything else has to revolve, perhaps that's why I do temp work, inbetween there is no job to worry about, and I can, if I am able to withstand the stress of financial worry, something that I am becoming better at, though it's taken years, focus on my own work again...

On another note, I've been in too many offices to mention, let alone recall, and have some ideas about how to architecturally design the workplace so that it facilitates the needs of the people who work there, how to humanize the workplace...

So I need an architect to work with, a business plan...

Will I get this wish?

A Spring Riot...

(An MP3 recording of this post may be found at: A Spring Riot...March 7, 2005.)

It's my birthday - & I'm wishing you the best day and year ever! I know it's not Spring where many of you live, so I'm sending you all the great, exuberant, fertile, creative energy of Spring! Hugs!!


A Spring Riot, or a walk with my dog past the flowers down to the lake today...

The blossoming crocuses, vivid purples and white to draw the admiration of bees who come humming, colour so pure it dances in my eyes, and marigold-colored stamens reaching up inside the cups of petals; the wisteria, a spray of yellow falling over the hedge, a dowry veil sewn with sun collected stitches---and perhaps the point of this photograph is the rock face with the hole that the tiny garden snail climbs out of, from the dark into the light, its yellow twirls and black dotted shell exposed on the white fieldstone, or maybe it's down at the lake where the Mallard duck, iridescent green of the male's plumes sleek against his yellow beak, who contentedly floats, sleeping or diving for fish, when he's not chasing to mate a duck who looks soft and fluffy and coos in that particular way...oh, it's a spring riot.


(An album of 5 photographs, not laid out linearly, but superimposed, perhaps a little clumsily, yet more the way I remember the walk---the colour of the flowers, such artistry, and the floating gathering of ducks in their watery home...and that snail, who perhaps thinks it's hidden!)