I find it odd that I can sleep easily, when I am not supposed to be sleeping, but when I turn off the light and get all my pillows arranged the night visitors come and demand that I stay awake and give them the attention that they feel they deserve. They are demanding, irrational, irritating, insatiable. Their constant questions are unanswerable. Is there solace in Descartes, cognito, ergo sum? More in poetry, than in science, cognito: TS Eliot knew.

Inside my brain a dull tom-toms begins
absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
capricious monotone

Fear and greed should never be the guiding light in our lives.

Why are God fearing people so often surprised when something bad happens to them? They act as if they are somehow the chosen ones and if they do certain rituals; go to church, pray, tithe, etc than nothing bad can happen to them. It is as if they can buy God's grace. Rosemary's grandson is having his first crisis of faith as his father is sick and he doesn't understand how a loving God can do this to him. It is hard to explain to a child still in the throws (sic) of pre-critical naivete that that isn't the point of a relationship with God. The point, I think, is that bad things still happen but that we can handle them much better when they do if we have that inner voice to talk to. Now I don't even know what God is and I don't really know why a relationship with IT works but it does and it is much better than being alone in a vast, indifferent cosmos. I guess that is what grace is although I am not sure. I know what it feels like. Can grace be defined or is it like love,romance, hatred, etc. another one of those words for the poets?

I have been tagged and have to tell 7 random things about myself. Here's a start:

1. I have rules that I must obey and they are: Never marry outside of your species and always have a current passport.

2. I have different personalities that do certain things for me, like attend meeting, speak publicly, There are 3 of them.I wrote about them in a prior blog so I won't repeat here.

3. I have enjoyed on occasion all of the 7 Deadly sins. I think about them alot.(Avarice, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Wrath)

4. I love to go on really hard hikes that I really can't do and always wonder while doing them if I am crazy.

5 I love to play and sing along to rock and roll songs really loudly in my car when I am driving. I like Pat Benetar's, "You're a Heartbreaker, Dream Maker,Love taker, don't you mess around with me".

6. I love to think about quantum physics and cosmology. This smallest things and the biggest things. Much needs to be resolved between the two.

7. In general, when I think about things in the abstract, I like animals more than people. This does not include my family and friends.

Would the universe exist without humans? We are the consciousness of it all. We are not just passive observers, our minds are part of the creation. There is no way we can be objective about this. We are the laws of physics. This is no more wacky than all the other creation stories. A quantum world is just how we define things now. These are just thoughts for the day, that I will develop further.

Simple faith isn't simple for me. I almost envy the people in my sister's church who accept the Bible without reservation. It is a child's faith, a faith that didn't go to college and have to go though the long period of doubt and questioning that I did. There was a time when I believed unquestionably, a blissful time of pre-critical naiveté. I think that now I am in a wonderful place of post-critical naivete. That is, I see the truth in it.. It is a document of amazing importance. It is the foundational literature of our culture. The old testament in particular was written by herders wandering in the desert. It is amazing. It is not unlike Shakespeare's histories, part myth, part history. I know that much of it is true, but not all is fact and that is a good thing. It doesn't have to be fact, it is parable, it is metaphor and as such it is beautiful. It was written in the language of poetry, of myth. Christ's importance to me is not that he is the son of God, it is that he taught us that we all were the sons and daughters of the same God. He tried to unite petty, waring tribes. It is ironic that it still isn't done and the battle is mainly in the place where Christ lived and did his work. I think we err horribly when we try to make the bible FACT, using the language of logos for a document written in the language of mytos. It would be like trying to say that a poem like TS Elliot"s Love Song of J Alfred Purfrock was fact. You sort of miss the point if you do.

CORRECTION! For all the purist and spellcheckers out there, and you know who you are.. Thank you, I need a permanent one because spell check isn't enough, big band isn't a misspelling it is a typo. Why can't computers know what I want to say? They try to tell us every thing else, like what button to push or they stubbornly refuse to do anything. My last comment reads, BIG BAND, it should read BIG BANG and honestly the pun wasn't intended but does work.

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise him all creatures hear me low(?), Praise him above ye(what does this mean?) heavenly hosts, Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost". I love the Holy Ghost best. He was a combination of Casper the Friendly Ghost, one of my favorite comics, and really scary Halloween ghosts which I love too. She was always a woman because it made no sense to me even as a wee child to have a totally masculine trinity. Everyone knows that it is Father, Mother and child. Why didn't they get this? How did Christianity become so misogynistic? When St Patrick went in to convert the heathen Irish the pagans insisted that there had to be a female god- head and so the Blessed Virgin arose to prominence and became the sweet ambassador for humans and God. God then became less wrathful (how did he get to be wrathful and not disobey one of his own 7 deadlies?) and became a God of love and redemption. Thank God for the Irish. One merely has to look at the art of the times to see what we were thinking about it all. God visually softened and didn't look so mean and judgmental. It is interesting to me how we went from cultures that had female deities to one that didn't like the idea very much. How did we change from a matrilineal society with female god-heads to a patriarchal one? Lets face it we wouldn't have civilization if women didn't demand it. We would still be marauding tribes, like most of the world still is since we don't have female deities. We need a balance here, the yin and the yang, the anima and the animus, republican and democrat, which to me represents the two world views, masculine and feminine. The eternal battle of the sexes played out in the nightly news. Go Hillary! The question then looms, will she just become another Athena woman like Margaret Thatcher, or really lead us into a more humane world. It is worth a try. That is the only real change, the other candidates are just business as usual.

The Greeks called romantic love the "madness of the Gods." It is madness in a way but it serves an important function at every age. In children, like play, it is practice in courtship (from courtly love) and how to flirt and how to select a worthy partner. In teenagers it get a little more complicated since they have so much stuff going on and a madhouse of chemicals in their brains. This is where one probably makes ones first choices for good or ill. There are those who "went steady" and those who didn't and I think that that pretty much separates the world. I didn't, I had the madness of the God's crushes though and was bitterly unhappy when I wasn't "in LOVE. The most important question you can ask anyone is if they liked High School.

What's interesting to me is that romantic love is timeless. Young adults marry, etc but older people who have no plans to reproduce (one thinks of poor Sarah in the bible having Isaac at 60 or so, good God, But I digress) Romantic love, according to my sister's favorite anthropologist, Helen Fischer, sees the purpose of Romantic Love (my caps) as a "way of weeding out unsuitable mates,(or selecting inappropriate ones) focusing ones attention and forming a socially visible pair-bond".... that presumably will last a lifetime. Love among the ruins no doubt had an adaptive function in the olden days. If nothing else it energized them(us) and makes them happy and keeps them in a healthy relationship with their children, ie distracted but filled with love. Emotional support is good too and can make backaches and other infirmities more tolerable.

What gets us in trouble as a culture, I am sure you would agree, is that nemesis of all good taste and morals - Hollywood. What they have done for violence in this country they are doing for love as well. Making it casual, gratuitous, ubiquitous and unrestrained thus just another sport or form of entertainment.

Another kind of love, one that flourished in medieval France and England was courtly love, a chaste love-more an ideal than reality. Love poetry flowered and men were nice to women. It was a necessary transition in the evolution of relationships, but romantic love has had consequences for modern society in that decisions are often made based on romantic ideals (do they drive a convertible) and not on who would make a good mate, provider, father/mother. Actually, our contemporary ideas of romantic love fall short of the ones below. I am running out of time, more later.

The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus.

The Twelve Chief Rules in Love

Thou shalt avoid avarice like the deadly pestilence and shalt embrace its opposite.
Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her whom thou lovest.
Thou shalt not knowingly strive to break up a correct love affair that someone else is engaged in.
Thou shalt not chose for thy love anyone whom a natural sense of shame forbids thee to marry.
Be mindful completely to avoid falsehood.
Thou shalt not have many who know of thy love affair.
Being obedient in all things to the commands of ladies, thou shalt ever strive to ally thyself to the service of Love.
In giving and receiving love's solaces let modesty be ever present.
Thou shalt speak no evil.
Thou shalt not be a revealer of love affairs.
Thou shalt be in all things polite and courteous.
In practising the solaces of love thou shalt not exceed the desires of thy lover.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be. Norman Mailer

Can sex lead us to holiness? Can sex be a transcendental experience? Most religions, eastern religions, seem to think so. It is hard to find anything in Christianity and the old Testament that would agree. The only place where I can find that it even hints at it is in Genesis 2 where Eve is made from Adams rib. The implied meaning being that man and woman are not complete without each other. But, the usual interpretation is that Eve is somehow less because of it. To me, Adam can't be whole without her. His relationship with her completes him and him her. I will write more later. I have to go swim now.

What is Love? I thought Keats put it well. " Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all/withhold no atom's atom or I die." I think that describes the feeling but what IS it. Chaucer was right too though: "How we delude ourselves when we love. Love is blynd." Is love pure chemical delusion? A massive cocktail of dopamine and nor-epinephrine that makes us crazy and sends lovers like Paulo and Franchesca to an eternal embrace in the first level of Dante's hell? Is love worth it? The Bible adds insights to love too: For love is as strong as death./Its passions are as cruel as the grave/And its flashes of fire are the very flame of God. (The Song of Songs) This is the dark side of love clearly and there is a dark side which one typically ignores. There are consequences to incautious love that shape our lives, but then Love makes us incautious. Is the purpose of love to just get us crazy enough to mate and have children? Then there is lust, where does that fit in? Is love really just lust. Why don't I know this?

The Seven Deadly Sins have attracted me one way or another for years and years. Still do. At one point I was afraid of them, then attracted to them and then practiced them, most of them anyway. Actually all of them. Wrath, anger was clearly the most destructive in my life but also the sin that most motivated me to take action to rid myself of it. Anger at what was happening to our wild lands in this state made me become involved with so many things: Reintroduction of endangered species, rescue of species and then the most active starting the Superstition Area Land Trust with my pal Rosemary and her sister Phyllis. Wrath has been very,very good to me. I can't say so much about the other's, Lust was always fun, but the consequences weren't always fun. The same with gluttony and sloth. Envy makes your crazy and so does greed. Pride makes people hate you. Which has led me to the whole idea of SIN. Sin isn't so much the act, it is the result of the act. The acts that go against the 7 deadlies or the 10 commandments are the very things that most often separate us from the Ground of our Being, our God, our community, ourselves. Sin is not so much an act as a state of mind caused by certain agreed upon acts. All the acts have an appropriate setting. Righteous Anger, stealing bread for your starving family, Killing in self-defense, etc. etc. aren't sins, because the acts don't cause separation. Of course, there are psychopaths who never experience remorse. What are they, then? Jimmy Carter admitted to Lusting in his heart and never heard the end of it. He didn't DO IT, people, he thought it? Apparently God and the media make no distinction.

The big 7: avarice envy, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath.

Name your poison. Which is your favorite?

This is a letter to my friend Jim but I liked it so much I thought I would post it now that I have remembered my password. What do you think is the greatest gift your parents gave you that you are the most thankful for? My parents gave me so much, curiosity, love of knowledge, tenacity, joy, humor, but the thing I think that I am most grateful for is that they gave me Arizona. They gave me this state before it was on the fast track to becoming Los Angeles. When is was more wild than tame and filled with possibilities. When it was hard to love because there was no air conditioning, no freeways, just lonely 2 lane highways to other small towns. I learned to love the land and its creatures, to name them and know them. It has served me so well I just keep trying to give back to it, to take care of it. A sense of place it critical for me. I have lived many places, Europe, Latin America but I have always come home. The bones of my ancestors are here. They gave me everything.