x-x-x-x-x. Jersey City

TwentySeven/December/Nine

| | | — | | Funny how this “diary” seems to have taken the same route as school work used to, starting out strong and waning as time went on. Kind of depressing. Maybe the cycle will come around again. It’s so interesting writing into a near-black hole. Knowing that this entry will be available to much of the world, but may never actually be seen by anyone. Staying with Rivka’s sister in Annapolis, MD, where she works for the US government; a job she’s not allowed to describe. We’ll be here for two months to help as her first baby is born. Single mother. Walking around the sprawling development she lives in daily, with Rinah, at 5 months old, in the Ergo baby-pack and Rags running around sniffing and pissing on shit. Today, Sunday afternoon and gorgeous, although there are many cars parked, noone is out, and even the houses seem lifeless. All the cars look new.

The development is in the neo-colonial style, with street names like Burton’s Cove Way, Puritan Way, John Carrol Way and others named after governors and people who may have come off the Mayflower. Wonder if an ad agency developed them. The buildings are of three styles; single family (town house?), two family and apartment building. All of each are nearly identical, excepting the siding, which is either a shade of brick between white and red, vinyl betweeen gray and white, or a combination. Most of the houses have bay windows and fake shutters in either forrest green or dark red. There are two “nature walks” paved with asphalt that wind behind the rows of houses, yesterday there was a family of deer very close to one of them. The young deer actually jumped over it’s mom to put her between it and the human.

In the apartment, cable TV has been playing movies for 10 hours a day, which can be draining. Noam Chomsky talks about how in the advertising agencies, the commercials are described as the content, and that which is between them, the filler. It’s a fact that minute per minute, the ads cost more. Some people are more capable than others of ignoring a telivision which is just on for ambiance. The trees are half evergreens, and ones which have lost their leaves for the winter. The ferns on the forrest floor are still green. There was a thick layer of snow on the ground when we arrived a few days ago, surrounded by dirty piles, bulldozed out of the parking lots or shoveled from the walkways. The trash hasn’t been picked up in many days, possibly due to weather, and is surrounding and heaped over the garbage cans in the wood-fenced off areas where people drop off their little packages of kitchen garbage.

Picked up an un-opened 5 pound burlap sack of Himalayan basmati rice, with a best if used by date of March of last year. Probably still good, right? But we’ll see what the ladies think.

Been warm and drizzly the last couple of days with the snow dissapating, steam rising into the fog. Beautiful. The thudding sound of melting snow piles falling from the trees and he drip of water falling through the gutters.

Our hearts have, aside from their basic plumbing role, two sides to their metaphorical existence. There is the heart that desires, and the heart that empathizes. The active and the receptive. The heart that desires is the house of our ambition as well as our envy, and the heart that empathizes is the root of our sensitivity, as well as our fear. So while we wanna listen to our heart, we want it to be a source of information, a translator from our deeper self, and not our master. It’s probably when we don’t listen to it that it’s more likely to be our master.

Our guts, aside from being our sewage system, we describe as the source of our intuition, the receptive aspect, and will, the active. So the intuitive aspect of the “gut”, our center, feeds it’s information to the receptive, empathetic heart, which contacts the self, the witness, generating multiple desires, and we decide which to act upon, sending the message back to the seat of power, our will, and guided by disciplin, manifest our desired reality.

Sooner, he lied. Mike |

27/12/2009