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New Civilization News: Coffee in the Backyard - Chapter 3 |
Category: Communities 16 comments 7 Mar 2004 @ 19:46 by bombadil : Hehehe ;-)I am looking forward to that one. BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA ¿Que hora son en {link:http://www.hosting-media.com/fr/virgin/manuchao/video/smilrtsp/primavera-01.ram|Albuquerque} ? 7 Mar 2004 @ 21:04 by Aiden @209.178.161.91 : Do they serve any tea in the backyard? The {link:http://www.teamuse.com/video_11.html|Tea Muse} wants to know :-) ¿que hora son en Inglaterra? 8 Mar 2004 @ 02:10 by jazzolog : Drink Organic Coffee We await further developments. Are there any globes with continents all over them in that guy's house? 8 Mar 2004 @ 13:53 by Hanae @69.33.46.10 : The wabi spirit of Coffe in theBackyard "mitwataseba hana mo momiji mo nakarikeri ura no tomaya no aki no yugure" ¿Que hora son en el {link:http://www.urasenke.or.jp/texte/chado/chado1.html|Japón} ? 8 Mar 2004 @ 14:21 by bombadil : "Globes with continents all over them" {link:http://www.manuchao.net/map2.htm|Precisely so}, jazzolog! How did you know? 15 Mar 2004 @ 10:28 by swan : Richard! Very funny, of course there are :-) This is my last comment from New Mexico John is just filling up my cup, I don't think it is organic but I am using soy milk so that balances things out. Aiden, there is also tea in the backyard, and trees and plants and rocks and various doo dads. I have seen a great deal of New Mexico and there is still lots I haven't seen. John said we put on 1000 miles if that tells a story. Will post further stories in Swan's Song and Hummingbirds Heart after I get the 200+ photos developed and pick a few of the best stories to tell. 15 Mar 2004 @ 10:32 by swan : IT is 10:30 AM here in Albuquerque, on this beautiful day. The weather has been fabulous, as the Gods have smiled on us. As for the time in those other places mentioned, you've got me! 16 Mar 2004 @ 15:34 by bombadil : Cool For passing through visitors and/or new members who might possibly not (yet) be familiar with "Swan's Song and Hummingbirds Heart", Swan's blog can be found {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v99|here}. The Muse will try and keep track of both stories and photos as they are being released and make sure to post here more specific links to all relevant entries relating to that project. 21 Mar 2004 @ 18:24 by bombadil : Stories & Photos from Swan's blog: {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000205&time=1079921917|New Mexico Churches} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000206&time=1079921917|New Mexico-Jemez Mountains} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000207&time=1079921917|More Jemez Mountains} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000208&time=1079921917|Inside Soda Dam} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000210&time=1080345368|Acoma Pueblo-New Mexico}, {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000211&time=1080345368|Acoma Pueblo-continued} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000212&time=1080345368|Ladder to the Sky} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000213&time=1080345368|Swan and John in New Mexico} {link:http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php?did=99&vid=99&xmode=show_article&amode=standard&aoffset=0&artid=000099-000222&time=1083089302|Bare Feet} 8 Apr 2004 @ 21:41 by koravya : Another Step Thursday evening, April eighth, at seven-twenty in the evening. I need to be thinking of something I can be doing that is both constructive and productive. I have been living in solitary confinement all of my life. I am living in a financial pit and I wish to win one of those Roadrunner Cash lottery jackpots so I can extricate myself from this pit. This is something I deserve. I do not deserve to be taken advantage of by lawyers and other thieves associated with the credit card and debt industry. Just give me a jackpot sufficient to liberate me from this economic bullshit so I can move on and do some good for this world. I have talent for creating beauty and goodness and all of my effort, work and time is being sucked up by people who are rotten to the core and most undeserving of the fruits of my labor. Liberate me from the shackles of oppression. I need to create a concept of reconciliation, growth, hope, and love with my dear Linette. I love her but I dont want to marry her, nor can I exactly envision living with her. I imagine that there is someone else out there who is more appropriate to my nature, but I certainly dont want to fool myself with surface features. Linette is a jewel with a heart of gold. She is overweight and undereducated and her fundamentalist Christian religion is alien to my concept of religious sensibility and practice. She is the person who makes me laugh, and thats a pretty tough one to get around. She brought Will and Raeanna into my life, which was good, and too many other people who were alien and destructive. I dont deserve any of that either, although sometimes one has to descend into the pit and the slime in order to retrieve the jewel. Now I have a wrong number call from someone looking for Lisa Ashbaugh. The lady asks if I am her husband. So is there a woman out there who I can see as my wife? After fifty-nine years in this dungeon of solitude and quiet, all of a sudden, I am going to meet Miss Compatibility. And in a way that surpasses the nature of my connection with Linette. You have got to back to the time when Linette and I were meeting and the kind of fun we were having with one another in the car late at night in the parking lot of the Pine Shed, with its little round table in its isolated corner next to the vacant pool table across the floor from the few lonely patrons at the bar. Havent had this kind of just hanging out fun since I was developing my memory when I was a first round college student. Theres that being yourself thing, when all of those years in those college classrooms pursuing all of those degrees are simply irrelevant. This girls voice spoke to my heart, so what do I care about how much education anyone whom I might meet might have? She knows what prayer is. I know what prayer is. We use different languages. I talked with her a few nights ago on the phone and she sounds like shes doing well in her sisters environment in Longmont, Colorado. Shes looking for her happiness. Is she going to find her happiness with me? She wasnt finding her happiness with me back in 99 and 2000, and 2001. I wasnt loving her the way she wanted to be loved, or the way she needs to be loved. It is one fine thing to be hearing from her and seeing her every once in a while, while the process of living together was proving to be an effort for both of us. Even wanting to please each other, we couldnt. Even wanting to see each other happy, there were obstacles that made us seem like the match made from hell. And thats pretty much where the whole thing wound up by January 16, 2002. She went to jail, and I had been economically abused. She almost got herself killed, more than once in more than one way, so shes still alive, thank the God we both pray to, and she needs to be figuring out now that she wants to continue her presently forty-one year old life into the indefinite future of a long life on this planet. She came and stayed for five days this last February 17, two years and a month and a day since wed said goodbye, Ill see you later, next to her car at the gas pump at the corner convenience store parking lot late at night. She didnt feel as she spoke during this visit that she had more than a couple or a few more years left to live, and was reconciling herself to that idea. She messed her body up and is living with hepatitis C, I think it was she called it, and the question then is, if she takes care of herself, and if she can live in an environment, in a place where people love her, can she live longer? Can she live some years of happiness? She certainly wasnt happy with Curtis and Wade. She was reaching for happiness from me and it wasnt there. Her head is in a very special place that very few people understand, and I have been blessed to know her as deeply as I have. Her heart is of the spirit, and when her spirit is nurtured, her kindness and love pour forth in waterfalls. So am I the man who gives her happiness, and is she the woman who gives me happiness? Or am I supposed to be meeting someone else who will take over my waking and sleeping mind to the point where I will have to say some kind of goodbye to Linette? I would not and could not want anything less for her than I want for myself, so insofar as my prayer is for my true partner, my prayer is that she should meet hers, and knowing her as I do, and how completely her heart has been given to me, it is hard for me to imagine that she can become as attached to someone else as she has been to me. She battles with her love for me, because it doesnt come back to her the way she wants it and needs it. My feelings are very special and strong for her, but there is a space she cannot enter. She gets very, very close, and that space she cannot enter is always there, and I hear her knocking and I cant let her in, and I wonder if there is someone out there with whom those doors are open. And if there are, will there not be some other doors closed that Linette had the gift for opening, even some of those rusted shut doors that I had forgotten even existed? Like the laughter that comes from the place where the humor hits home. 11 Apr 2004 @ 17:19 by koravya : Day in School Late Saturday evening, April tenth, my mothers eighty-fifth birthday, and my friend Katelyn Swans fifty-third birthday, and I spent the day at school from about seven-fifteen to four forty-five, however much time that is, because it was a good day, however many hours it was was not a question. In fact, it was a rather splendid day today, especially near the end when the Writing Analysis team of Victoria, Joe, and Yolanda came up with a theme for their coordinated research project of the related questions concerning the relation between morality and decision making in extreme circumstances on the part of the individual, the process by which morally committed individuals can reach out to one another and find one another and create associations of morally committed and directed action, and for the third part, how such movements and organizations have fared within the historical context of the United States, not to include the current moral dilemma facing the national consciousness. All they had to do was pick a contemporary issue and break it down into three subcategories for a teamwork research paper. Most of the issues chosen by various teams are straightforward, unambiguous, easily definable contemporary issues. These three have gone to the root of things and they are looking for direction. I almost choked with astonishment when I saw what they came up with. It was the chemistry of those three minds finding common ground and a vocabulary together with which to take a stand on something they feel and recognize as important. That was Victoria, Joe, and Yolanda in the afternoon. The morning was more on the order of individual work with writers in my Comp One class. There was a session with Marivell who is coming from her native Spanish into English as her second language. She is good for where shes coming from and she works hard and takes her essays seriously and really puts her sense of everyday humor and seriousness into her essays, and all kinds of second language glitches crop up like delightful little weeds all over her essay, and when I point them out, she recognizes them immediately and laughs in a humorous self-deprecating manner . . . how could I have been so stupid, how could I have not seen that, and I wrote this late at night when I was tired and I make more mistakes when Im tired, I need to write in the daytime when I can pay more attention . . . she is looking for her time when her writing comes out best. Such a pleasure to work with her. Then Brett comes along and showed me some of his resources for his research paper topic on slavery in the modern world. This is a real issue, and he is finding some good books and is enthusiastic about learning more about this subject. And then later in the morning, he comes up with this Illustration essay about the deterioration and loss of common everyday trust amongst modern Americans. Brett is a short, husky black fellow with a very pleasant courteous demeanor, and he told the story of how a few days ago, he noticed an elderly black man having some car trouble on the other side of a gas station parking lot, so Brett walked over to offer some friendly assistance, and the old man backed up, horrified at Bretts approach telling him to get away. This is one example of the erosion of personal trust in our society that Brett sees, and carries a step further, gently and not heavy-handedly suggesting that the individual experience and the national experience are mutually translatable, and he stated the whole thing in some of the best language Ive seen him write during these last four weeks. Saw Tim and Carla sitting at a table in the student lounge area, an open space in the center of the building at the crossroads of the three principal hallways where they come together in a T. I retrieved the research paper Tim wrote last quarter for Comp Two Hes a good writer and a serious student and he wrote an almost perfect research paper, and we paged through it while I recommended some small but important changes necessary to transform his paper into a more nearly perfect essay. Got to say Very Good to a lot of people today because they deserved it. If I can get going with a class, things can blossom. Every class is a different mix, and depending on who that mix consists of, some classes are as smooth as real silkworm silk nurturing its chrysalis, while other classes are as rocky as a rutted road when middle-school attention spans infiltrate the room in the guise of responsible adults. Then my attention is drawn away from the subject as I attend to issues of classroom protocol. Insofar as these wayward behaviors in my Friday night Economics class irritate me, the quality of my delivery is compromised, and what follows, the quality of interest and inspiration I can generate, and the quality of the response that will be generated by the clowns who have not quite learned a couple of very important lessons, becomes retarded. 13 Apr 2004 @ 12:23 by swan : I didn't realize your mother and I shared a birthday. Isn't that grand. I think I had the best birthday ever this year, though I say the same thing each year. The years just keep getting better. 13 Apr 2004 @ 12:25 by swan : Stay true to yourself and your intentions and what you desire will come to you, either through Linette or someone even more suited to your nature. 15 Apr 2004 @ 00:09 by koravya : Keeping the back straight Wednesday into Thursday, April fourteenth into the fifteenth, evening into the morning, looking forward to the Comp One class tomorrow morning, having emerged from a Tuesday morning Portfolio class and a Wednesday morning economics class. April, my dear, spent nearly an hour on her makeup quiz for last week and came up with a 45, which is not the worst grade that anyone got on that quiz. There is one A, and everyone else is Cs, Ds and Fs going into the halfway point of this course. It is the upcoming projects that will redeem those who are doing poorly in their quizzes. This is the fifth week of this set of ten week courses, so my sense of who is getting it and who is not getting it is developing. 27 Apr 2004 @ 22:00 by koravya : Tambura Thursday evening into Friday morning, April fifteenth into the sixteenth. Here is a snapshot of a moment in time, a bubble of life on the Rio Grande river of Life on this planet from the time when the water fell from the clouds and filled the valleys between the deserts. For every breath there is another thought, and all of them are nothing more than variations on a theme. The strings of the tambura resonate in the background. Four strings in sequence of never-ending vibration; like the waves on the beach, rolling in, breaking, reaching into the sand, receding into a new beginning. There is a lower back that needs to be kept straightened out and a neck that needs to seek its proper curve, for all of these thoughts to flow through. There are many things to think about and the only path through which they may be thought out is that of a properly aligned spine and neck. This mornings composition one class went well and there is a fairly good connection being developed between the instructor and most of his twenty-two students in this class. Now there is a brief morning interlude between the first three classes of the week, and the final three classes of Friday evening and Saturday. The star and the planet are in the sky, just on the other side of the branches overhead reaching into the darkness, while the plants in the garden root themselves into the dirt; and when I feel my legs and feet rooted into the ground alongside these primeval companions, while reaching through the vibrations of the tambura, through the branches to the stars and our neighboring planets, I think my decisions will work themselves out in a life-confirming direction. For now, there are things to look forward to tomorrow, and other things to look forward to further down the line. 27 Apr 2004 @ 22:02 by koravya : Light Conversation Sunday morning, April eighteenth. This symbol of the intersecting rectangles inscribed within a circle, together with attendant series of drawings, cantos of inscriptions, and title is in the hands of Tara. Other entries in Communities 1 Jul 2010 @ 12:14: Happy Birthday Canada 25 Oct 2008 @ 05:37: Politics, economy, culture and society of New Civilization 10 Apr 2008 @ 13:52: Survival 8 Apr 2008 @ 18:19: Freedom and Self-Selection 1 Mar 2008 @ 16:56: Whimsical Gardenings 30 Jan 2008 @ 18:06: A Bigger Flag to Fly 25 Nov 2007 @ 11:18: A Mournful Thanksgiving 8 Nov 2007 @ 01:49: The value of connections 12 Jul 2007 @ 14:58: Auroville. 5 Jun 2007 @ 20:31: Biocities.
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7 Mar 2004 @ 12:49, by swan