heartbreak haiku

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Once she pulled the thread
Life unravelled rather quick
And I'm no seamstress

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Shadows lurking near
Easily dissolve with light
Where is that flashlight?

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The prayer for today:
May my heart continue to
Break open, gently.

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If ever you've tried
Loving in spite of violence
You know what I'm sayin'

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Betrayal knows none
Better than me this autumn
Here's to raking leaves.

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I've written you lots
But the end is all the same:
you can't even read

on love

"When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips."

-- Khalil Gibran

Chinese Astrological Calendar

I've spent the last few weeks creating a Chinese Astrological Calendar to aid in my studies of astrology and general energy watching of the seasons. It contains the heavenly stems and earthly branches in an easy to read color-coded fashion for every day from now until august 2009 in a big 11x17 format. It also has the seasonal nodes, moon phases, and tidal hexagrams for the months, as well as a reminder of what that month is about. And because I made it pretty (see below), I've decided to offer it for sale. The cost is $25, please email me if you are interested.

References for my paper on Salt-Sensitive Hypertension

Over at Deepest Health, I put up a guest posting on a Classical Chinese Medicine view of a modern disease process, Salt-Sensitive Hypertension. Below are the references I site in the work, in case you are interested in perusing them further. I welcome your comments here, or on eric's blog.

[i] Am J Kidney Dis. 2007 Oct;50(4):655-72. Pathophysiological mechanisms of salt-dependent hypertension. Rodriguez-Iturbe B, Romero F, Johnson RJ.

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertension

[iii] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr55/nvsr55_19.pdf

[iv] Kempner W. Treatment of kidney disease and hypertensive vascular disease with rice diet. N C Med J1944; 5: 125–133

[v] Nephrol Ther. 2007 Sep;3 Suppl 2:S94-8. Abnormalities of renal sodium transport and blood pressure sensitivity to salt. Burnier M.

[vi] http://duedall.fit.edu/ocn1010eng/jan27sp.htm

[vii] http://www.palomar.edu/oceanography/salty_ocean.htm

[viii] Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

[ix] Salt, Diet, and Health. MacGregor & deWardener. Cambridge University Press: 1998.

[x] Jones, E. The symbolic significance of salt in folklore and superstition. In: Essays in Folklore, Anthropology, and Religion. Vol. 2 Hogarth Press, 1951. London.

Omnivore's 100

Everyone is doing it these days, so now its my turn. Pass it on.

Here are the instructions:
1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4. Optional extra: Post a comment here linking to your results.

The Very Good Taste Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (thailand!)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (regrettably)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Not bad. Fortunately, I'm only 31. I'm hoping to knock the rest out, especially once I know what some of these actually are.

Barack the Vote!

me and 75,000 of my closest friends.

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

by David Pinchbeck. On December 21, 2012 we know that many things will happen. For one, this happens to be the winter solstice, and the alignment of the earth, moon, and sun with Sagittarius A, what is thought to be the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Secondly, the Mayan calendar expires, reaching the end of its long count, and ushering in a new world. Based on this calendar each world stage, reflected by the 9 levels of the Mayan pyramid and our spiral galaxy, increases in speed and thus decreases in duration based on the solar calendar. Thus, the worlds proceed in a manner that marks major transitions:

* First World: 16.4 billion years ago. The Big Bang. Development of cellular life on earth.

* Second World: 820 million years ago. Animal life emerged.

* Third World: 41 million years ago. Evolution of primates and first use of rudimentary tools.

* Fourth World: 2 million years ago. Tribal organization.

* Fifth World: 102,000 years ago. Homo sapiens emerged. First use of language.

* Sixth World: 5,125 years ago (from 2012). Creation of patriarchal society, law, writing.

* Seventh World: 256 years ago. Creation of Industrialization, Electricity, Technology.

* Eighth World: 12.8 years ago (from 2012). 1999. The dissemination and consumption of global information via the Internet.

* Ninth World: 260 days after 2012. ???


Its anyone's guess as to what will happen at this point, but there is plenty of conjecture. Some hypothesize that the earth's poles will undergo a magnetic shift, causing problems in instrumentation but also in the migratory patterns of birds and insects. Some hypotheses put the culmination of peak oil at this date, at which point massive socio-economic shifts will take place, leading to increased pressure on food stores and fresh water supplies. Some think that 2012 will usher in the first use of widespread nuclear weapons. Global warming will decimate the planet.

Pinchbeck attempts to fill in the question marks and in so doing hits all of it in this book: global warming, massive culminations of wealth by the very few, exponentially increasing availability of information through the internet, terrorism and runaway nation-states, excessive materialism and its effect on our psyche, nuclear proliferation, disintegration of the family and our national health.

Quoting Marcuse: "There is a fundamental irrational rationality of our system. Industrialization and mechanization could - and logically should - have led to a reduction in labor time and the institution of a post-work and post-scarcity global society after World War II... The response to this deep threat to the controlling apparatus was the creation of "false needs" in the consumer, the perpetuating fear of nuclear war and terrorism, and the use of the mass media to enforce consensus consciousness:

The union of growing productivity and growing destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender of thought, hope, and fear to the decisions of the powers that be; the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitute the most impartial indictment. Its sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, is itself irrational.

The great mass of humanity forfeits their inner freedom of thought, conscience, and will to participate in this system, which presents itself as inevitable, inescapable, and airtight."

Pinchbeck looks at the theme behind all of these trends, and gives archetypical descriptions along with personal and global ramifications of all of it. He goes about answering these questions in a very personal way, one that i think we are all ultimately facing: do we find in ourselves the strength to change what is necessary in order to avoid total extinction? Pinchbeck's answer is ultimately a Gnostic one, where he integrates multiple shamanic religions and narratives to arrive at an answer that corroborates well with my own understanding of our role. Fear is the first and most natural response given any threat. But because we have a higher role as human beings, we must ultimately move past our fear and overcome ourselves first to usher in the change that we so desperately need.

Quoting Gebsner:

All work, the genuine work we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in an otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse. Anyone dissociated from his origin and his spirituality sensed task acts against origin. Anyone who acts against it neither has a today nor a tomorrow.

The Qur'an

So, for my first month of sagely living (see previous post) I'm going to be reading and studying the Qur'an (the Koran), the holy book of the Muslims as revealed by God to the prophet Muhammed. I chose this book for many reasons, some of which political, some of which spiritual, but I've simply never read it at all and there are a lot of people who have (20% of the world). Because school is starting in a week, and because I'm always trying to balance my life, I didn't want to overload on Chinese Medicine (though I was very tempted to read and translate The Art of War). I'm happy to be beginning this project and I chose Thomas Cleary's "Essential Koran" translation as a starting point.

There are some interesting things I've already learned. For one, the idea that reading the Qur'an in English is rather impossible task. As I've written here before about the limited nature of English, and the multi-layered meanings inherent in languages like Chinese and Arabic, a translation of this book into English lacks a great deal at the onset. Cleary understands this and creates some devices to help stretch English, like using poetic phrasing and pronouns. However, this is one of those things that would be hard to understand even if I did speak Arabic:

The text of the Qur'an reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into drops against the rocks at sea. The Qur'an displays human language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine. -- Seyyid Hussein Nasr

Thus, "the dramatic shifts in person, mood, tense, and mode become exhilirating exercises in perspective and translation of consciousness into a new manner of perception."
Whoah.