Mike's coming home soon

One morning he woke up as a giant palmetto bug. This is not what he had been right along.
His wife woke up and was on the wrong train, traveling a route completely different from her planned trip.
Their daughter's husband turned back into a scorpion and was banished from the house.
Like Harry Potter, their grandson was protected by the love surrounding him, and remained the angel he had always been.
What evil forces had been angered or awakened?

Mike in November

nov 27 2014

doing tonglen for mike this morning.  brought up some questions about what we want from a friend, and will we still be their friend when that is gone?  then thinking of Mike as a teacher, what do we want from a teacher ? made me think of chogyam trungpa taking off his robes...wearing a suit...he was then rejected as a teacher by both students and friends.  How did some of his followers and friends make the switch?  and when he lost use of one side of his body, how did some people continue to be his friend and student?
i thought of Mike, and what I just read about the perfect situation for a writer and scholar being prison. 
and i thought about 5 telling me how z got a new massage client who remarked it was the first time she'd had a quiet (non-talking) massage....and she keeps coming back.
mike is still our teacher if we can learn.

my imaginary friends may be real and you maybe not

so i got another box from the attic.
stuff my mom saved from my childhood and then gave to me.
maybe i can get rid of it!

here's my baby book, something mothers worked hard at.
oh look, i had an imaginary friend, a rabbit.
i have no memory of such a thing.
apparently it had to have a place to sit at dinner.
my parents loved this stuff.

i'm thinking my next imaginary friend was Jesus,
i took to him at a very early age.
my parents were not so happy about that,
but they let me live in that rabbit hole until i outgrew it.

which i did, and then went without imaginary friends for years.
were those my years as a grown-up?
now that i'm a Buddhist i have many many imaginary friends!
if i become a Hindu i'll have multiple times that number.

my friend the Shaman has his power animal (i keep wanting to say 'familiar' but that's witches)
it sits by him at dinner (apparently on the floor) or so he mentioned at dinner recently.
is that his imaginary friend, or is it real?
in which case aren't they all real?

real as anything else?

making sense of parties

something i read the other day has stuck in my mind.
an explanation of traits of introverts vs extroverts.
the part that stuck was about parties.
it said that introverts go to parties looking forward to spending time with people they know.
extroverts go to parties looking forward to meeting new people.

that stopped my mind.
going somewhere with the idea of looking forward to meeting new people. i cannot wrap my mind around that idea.
but looking back at the behavior of some of my friends, i can see it now!
it all makes sense!  they look forward to meeting new people.

is this obvious and i just missed it all these many years, that such a thing was common and not a weird affectation of a few people i knew?

i wonder what that's like?  i wonder if i could try it?

lightning strikes

NPR has a little map showing the last 18 months of lightning fatalities in the USA.  i clicked on one near my home, and it was the lightning death of a teenage boy. crazy, huh?

when i was a child my parents had some friends who had escaped the nazis and brought their two little kids to this country, where the kids, playing in a field with their metal wagon, were struck and killed by lightning.  i actually recently found this article about them online, with no date, but i think it was from 2001, as i also found his obituary from 2004.

that story stuck with me through my life, a profound example of something or other.

recently i asked my friend Vicki and her mom what they would do if they were out in a field and heard thunder, would they lie flat, would they squat, or would they (bad move) RUN.  

my friend's mom said "i wouldn't be out in a field.  i'd be at the mall."  is this why statistically mostly men are killed by lightning?

sock dolls

a friend of mine collected some discarded sewing machines, and started an afternoon sewing class for children.  boys and girls came and loved it!  
she was looking for project ideas and i remembered i used to make dolls out of old socks, trying to invent new kinds.
i found a few i still had, and she took them to her class. two of the kids decided to make merfolk (a mermaid and a merman)  
wish i had a picture of the ones the kids made...here are some of mine...

teeny xmas book

liz made some teeny tiny books to sell at the xmas craft fair in december.
they were so well made, with such good quality paper, i had to have one.
even tho she had added a ribbon to hang it on the xmas tree,
which is not something i do.
but they were so wonderful, i got one anyway.

after xmas i realized i could write in it if i wanted!
what if i wrote in one every year, what happened on xmas?
what if i'd started this years ago?  

as the chinese saying goes "the best time to plant an apple tree is 10 years ago. 
the second best time is now" 
or something like that.

so i wrote in this one and plan to buy a few more...
let's see, if i live to be 120 i'll need...omg.

well it turned out the darn thing had like 40 some pages! (each page had 2 sides)
here's the first 4 pages (i only wrote on one side)

"now two-thousand twelve is ending"
"tis december twenty five"
"and despite the mayan warning"
"we have managed to survive"

and on and on and on it goes!!

i can haz book?

tiny women stand up and dance!

mudpie joins with other female tinies on Raglan Shire's beach to dance for women's lives!

Petlove Petshop is making a video for the One Billion Rising campaign, part of second life's participation in this call to action to end violence against women and girls. 
not that violence is a problem for tinies, but out of solidarity with our biggie and real life sisters!
on February 14, 2013, men and women in Second Life will join activists, writers, thinkers, celebrities, and people across the world to Walk, Dance, and Rise as a show of unity, individual strength, and the need for change.

hooray for the post office !

it's great to get internet greetings saying Happy Birthday -- email, FB, twitter, and even e-cards.  e-cards can be amazing. but you know what? my favorite is still snail mail cards.  i know, i know, they use up trees for paper, they cost money and need stamps, exhaust-spewing trucks and gas hogging planes have to transport them across the country. plastic pens are a blight upon the earth i'm sure.

but still...
i love the suspense of bringing them home from the p.o. and opening them.
i love that my friends went to all this trouble to choose one, write on it, lick it, stamp it, mail it.
i love that they are around the house for as long as you want them, and whisper to you "you have friends out there!" 
it's good to have that reminder lying around your house.
especially in cold January!

tea and film discussion

snowing like mad today. yay!
i love the bright sunny days, but more snow will be fun.

a friend and i met in a tibetan teahouse to discuss the movie SAMSARA, which he sent me a copy of.
a profoundly disturbing film.  has anyone else seen it?  we can find a teahouse with more pillows.  (maybe somewhere warmer, too)

heart's quilt

a friend of mine is working through a trauma in her life by making a quilt.
witnessing her progress, i understand something new about art.
she's only using patterns of one color, indigo, but shape and arrangement tell the story!
really it seems more like music composition than a visual tale --
long smooth shapes are her life before.  
then small sharp cornered shapes jumbled crazy-quilt style as everything is thrown into sorrow, confusion, shock, and uncertainty.
after that comes the orderly opening freedom of the new future!
it will look amazing. and meanwhile, she recovers and heals.
i wonder how many quilts that i have viewed and thought, "nice", "lovely", "gorgeous", "weird", were opening someone's deepest heart to me, and i had no idea!

An autumn of visitors!

it's true -- Vermont is the new North Carolina.
here it is december and no snow covering the ground.
how will santa even find us?
here's how it looks:


















a little time off now after such a busy fall.
first came college friends to brookfield,
then halloween kittens

we blew up our 'scream' and had it around for halloween
and again for thanksgiving, when there was a wedding
at our house!


















28 years and they are finally legal
at least in the Republic of Vermont.
the scream was not part of the wedding,
altho we considered including it.















saturday morning a flock of turkeys went through our yard

but crossed the road just as i found my camera.
why did they cross the road?

Rude Veggies

in one of those british tv shows, as kind of a casual aside from the plot, there was a box for collection of rude vegetables.  apparently there was to be a contest judged by  -- of course --the parish priest.  

i had no idea what a rude vegetable might be until the contents of the box were shown!

what a fun idea!  carrot growers especially have had many a hoot over their crop.  i mentioned it to my neighbor, and she brought this one by yesterday. 

could my town have a contest like this?  not likely!  this is america - we are above that sort of thing.

*giggle snort*

out beyond wifi

(View from the house -- photos by Josephine, not me)

the floating bridge (photo by josephine)

a friend from college borrowed a house in Brookfield -- a totally out-of-the-way town.  the house is on a narrow dirt road off a wider dirt road off a back road.  thank goodness another friend lent me her GPS or i'd never have found the place in the dark in total autumn fog!

 we had a great time, 6 friends from all over the country who see each other once a year or so.


Brookfield is known for its floating bridge - currently closed for repairs - and surprisingly there's a wonderful restaurant there, too, Ariel's.

vermont's leaf show was not up to par this year, but vermont is always beautiful (except maybe in November)

veggie heaven

a food day today.
our neighbor's been generously sharing the garden produce, and our fridge hardly closes.
last year it was zooks.  ..i'm just eating the last of my frozen zuchinni bread!
this year it is cukes, cabbage, rainbow chard, tomatoes, and a pepper or squash here and there.
so delicious! but!
today is the day.
last week i started the vinegar made from blackberries and water. 

we're eating the amazing tomatoes fast as we can.
today i washed and briefly steamed 3 pots of chard, and bagged and froze it for winter soups.
the long colorful stems, i debated, then (shhh) threw away. as Ma said in Jeff Danziger's Out In The Sticks "want not, freeze not."
i used the rest of the cabbage to make a big lot of cole slaw to eat for a few days.
the remaining cukes became 2 jars of refrigerator pickles (not worth dragging out the canning equipment)
now i just have the not-quite-ripe pears on my pear tree, and all the quince if i want to make jelly.
who needs a CSA when you have NGV -- neighbor growing (too many) veggies.

ms y times ms x = drama squared

which comes first, a dramatic life, or a career cutting hair?  Sweeney Todd had plenty of drama before he took up the profession, but does it also cause life-drama?

 i called ms x for an appointment yesterday, caught her at home without her book, it was the anniversary of her mom's death -- now there's a story!  

we ended up on the phone for an hour. her life is so dramatic, she even has an identical twin,  not exactly an evil twin but...  when i said someone told me you were also working at the salon down the street, she said her twin, ms y, had without telling her taken a job there and some customers had gone there thinking it was my ms x. twin hair-dressers (*cough* cosmetologists) must = drama squared!

i'll try her again next week.

we should all be so lucky

a few months ago a friend sent this email to me and several hundred other people to let us know about his mom...hope he doesn't see this! too good not to share.


 FOR YEARS I'VE ASKED MOM TO NOT DO ANYTHING ON MONDAYS AS I'M TIRED FROM THE TWO TWELVE HOUR SHIFTS I DO AT xxxxxx OVER THE WEEKEND SO YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW PERTURBED I WAS WHEN I FOUND HER MONDAY MORNING, HAVING PASSED ON PEACEFULLY IN BED THE NIGHT BEFORE. WE SHOULD ALL BE SO LUCKY! ALL MY RELATIVES DESCENDED UNINVITED THE NEXT DAY & JUST LEFT, DO I GET MOM'S BOSE RADIO? THE SILVER? THE NEW WICKER SET ON THE PORCH?? NO- I GET A SMELLY, FILTHY, FLATULENT DOG...... ALL THE GOOD STUFF IS GONE ALREADY.... VULTURES I TELL YOU!! I APPRECIATE ALL YOUR "THOUGHTS", BUT IN LIEU OF 'SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS' EMAILS I WILL ACCEPT CASH.

WOOTSTOCK 2012

it's one of life's great pleasures to have people show up at the house on a saturday or sunday summer afternoon and sit on the porch all day and talk.  i love it!
this weekend we had drop-ins both saturday AND sunday.
only teeny drawback -- it was WOOTSTOCK IN RAGLANSHIRE for only ONE WEEKEND!
fortunately i had my stock and wooted too, because i got to the last concert of the weekend after all.
it's worth it for the music alone, and the costumes are outrageous.
here's a few snapshots:

onstage - dj's - the guru and the diva?

mudpie rocks out in coveralls while others 'peace out'

hippy on hippo

fireworks finale - this doesn't do it justice

painting the church

across the street a van pulls up and unloads men and ladders. 

they've been working all week on the big new england white church, scraping, sanding, and now painting.  it's going to look great! 

they are a quiet group, well behaved, fairly lean, did you guess? 

i didn't at first. but i'm pretty sure they are from the prison.  

a good deal for the church, non-profits can hire them for a low wage, and a good deal for them.  

make some money, get out of jail for a week, do some good for somebody in the summer sunshine and green hills.

it used to creep me out a little to see these guys out working somewhere or playing volleyball in the prison yard,

until someone pointed out to me that they are pretty much mostly our friends and neighbors.

tripping on no-mesh

due mostly to laziness and non-inspiration, i still haven't upgraded to MESH !!  as more and more people use it, my view of second life has become more interesting. fewer cookie-cutter barbie and ken avatars, idealized houses and furnishing, and more CRAZY LOOKING STUFF

Osprey, who has never been cookie-cutter, is becoming less and less human to me, and wearing clementine's herring boxes for sandals.


 the fabulous SL9B lotus stage was, to me made of legos *smile smile*   and some of my fellow meditators look like pieces of cheese.

 and what are these things for sale? Buddhas? to me they are like beautiful stones. i admit i'm having fun.  like wearing distortion glasses.