Category: ?

Free of labels, which is also a good attitude.

Reb Cat’s Yoga

THE STORY GOES THAT YOGA was first disclosed to an Indian prince by a cat who consented to teach the prince the secrets of feline flexibility. Whether or not that’s true, the cat who lives with Ann & I repeatedly teaches the following tranquility-yoga. The position is called “Sleeping Hand Cat,” and it goes like this:

1. “Let C = a comforting hand-shaped anthropomorphism” — i.e., of God, or Jesus, or Buddha, or your mom or dad, or whatever best evokes your own most watchful-and-protective self.* The literality of this visioning is not as important as the feeling.

2. Lay on your left side in the most comfortable manner with a firm but soft pillow under your head. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing until you’re in a relaxed state of awareness.

3. Imagine/visualize C as the pillow beneath your head. Really feel your head cradled and protected, as though nothing can get past your protector to harm you.

4. Continue until sleep overtaketh and give way to pleasant dreams, or until you want to get up. (But why would you want to?)

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* Atheist fanboys may find benefit with Aragorn or Eowen. (But not from their movie versions.)

Get Your Seats Now

SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY METEORS an hour are predicted for next year’s Draconid shower, when the earth passes through a knot of Comet Giacobini-Zinner debris. (Note: it’s best observed from Europe, Africa and the Middle East.) Mark your calendars and and reserve a tramp-steamer today!

– Alert courtesy of http://spaceweather.com/ (10/7/10 edition)
– Starmap: http://www.imo.net/calendar/2010#dra

World Space Week! With Balloons!

THE THINGS YOU LEARN WITH a computer: This is World Space Week, shining a pre-dawn beacon on the modern launchpad set, and in observational honor thereof I offer the Brooklyn Space Project: a father-and-son team who sent a HD-camera-and-GPS-equipped weather balloon to touch the edge of space. (Evidently these things are all the rage on YouTube, but it’s the first one I’ve seen.) My favorite moments were the weird electronic chorus at 60,000 feet (?) and learning that a collapsing weather balloon does make a sound when there’s no one in space to hear it scream. (Pun courtesy of Ridley Scott.)

$1 Says Martians By 2020

AS OUR EYES GET BETTER adjusted to the eternal night sky (read: as we build bigger and more specific telescopes) we are beginning to discover that planets are more common than we thought — and now, life may be as well.

Yesterday’s Wired News carries the story about Gliese 581g, the first exoplanet found within a star’s habitable zone — meaning the orbital zone favorable to liquid water and, at least as we know it, life.

So I’m creating a Martian Pool. $1 says we find exoplanetary life, or compelling evidence favoring the discovery of same, within 10 years. Who’s in?

The Shape Of Time

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THAN I am now, I used to think Time was arranged in neat little blocks as on the calendar. The “bottom of the month” felt like the bottom of the month, and I delighted in each month’s miraculous invert midnight flip; individual weeks swayed as a rope bridge over sequential chasms whose walls were the weekends.

A ghost of that image still brushes my mind whenever I think about calendars, specifically my “place” “on” them. But Time no longer seems to come in boxes; instead it flows away from everything I see: Continue reading “The Shape Of Time”

Wrapping Round

EVER CATCH HOLD OF THE edge of a metaphor that no amount of teasing will out?

That’s why I call the blog “The Metaphorager” in fact: I sometimes feel like Newton’s beachcomber looking for the one bit of sea-wrack which will reflect the whole in some previously unseen and unillumined way. And on this sunny morning in Sonoma, that would be the brawnshouldered road crew about to plumb our street for waterpipe repairs. The pipes provide and conceal a transparent service; like the paint on a wall invisibly thick with wires, joists, nails, sawn trees and whatever smashed-thumb swearing filled the builder’s moment. Unseen — but take them away … Continue reading “Wrapping Round”

Night-time Toddy

A ZOROASTRIAN (BECAUSE HE WAS, and because sometimes it really does matter) once jumped the battery of my otherwise unbroken vehicle on an otherwise sad day and, because this is my life, we got into a discussion of God(1) and it wasn’t long before we were agreeing on the need to sleep peacefully at night and that one cannot do that without being right with God (read, said he: right with one’s fellows), and hoping for the best of whatever’s the next world, or even next unseen moment, without such store of good- and God-will is a vain enterprise indeed; which thought seems to be one also preached by at least all the paths I traveled in the circuitous route to root and seed which is the path of all life and words and, and to ignore this discomplicating fact my new Zoroastrian friend told me (and still tells in brain-snapshot’ metaphor, read: man jumps battery; jumpstarts the journeyer; recharges the charge; do I have to make it plainer?) would keep it unshared with wherever and whoever your Sunday finds you: snugly newspaper-nested, walking the line, paddling madly onshore. And isn’t that what he was really saying?

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(1) That Indescribable Essence which is never the same from you to me or anywhere in between, and which I persist in describing here and there.

Come Out To Sonoma

HAVING MENTIONED THIS ON FACEBOOK yesterday in the wake of U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s 136-page ruling against Proposition 8, I’d better repeat it here:

Neal Ross Attinson offers his services as secular ULC minister to marriage-seeking gay California couples

My only balk is doing anything in Jesus’ name, since I’m both unqualified and uninterested. (“Bob” is okay, though; I’m biordanial.) And may I suggest this spring in Sonoma?

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