A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (as sung by Cinderella)

I seem to still be on a New Year tangent, full of hope and pro-activity and forward motion - think I'll ride the wave of optimism before the roots of reality take hold... :-)

SONG: A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes as sung by Cinderella

BOOK: This Year I Will...: How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution or Make a Dream Come True by M. J. Ryan

POEM: New Year Prayer by David Whyte

This robust heart involved

with too many worlds

for its own good,

this portion of creation

constantly trying

to make its self singular,

this chef at home in the kitchen

among the gleam of knives,

sommelier

among eclectic bottles,

sometimes dreaming

as a hermit among leaves,

drinking the centuries

of inherited silence,

sometimes the

social host opening

the doors and lighting

the candles,

often a father lifting his daughter

high up above him

and then

the husband

sheltered by night

attempting

to talk and talk again,

too often now

as the years go by

the son worrying

for a father sitting

Atlantic miles away,

in a silent

remembered parallel.

And now this

other parallel,

this symmetry

inside

for everything

on the outside,

the writer in winter

at his desk,

caught in the light,

beneath the window,

bringing together

the last and the first,

the middle and the edge,

the near and the far,

the troubled lives

all calling for the one line

and the one life,

for creation came together

in a central

unspoken wish,

to be held

and made one

like a god's blessing

out of nowhere,

the pen

somehow

touching a wound

that heals them all.

QUOTE: "Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions." ~ Edgar Cayce

Nightswimming (R.E.M.)

SONG: Nightswimming by R.E.M.

BOOK: Our Town: A Play in Three Acts by Thornton Wilder

POEM: The Dreams of the Old by Timothy J. Nolan

So they are around our table—my mother,

my father, an uncle—and we begin to talk

about our dreams—with some urgency—

as if our dreams could pinpoint our psychic

dangers—our unrealized goals—our

ordinary fear of death and the future.

My mother talks about her dreams of flying

over the little town where she grew up—

over the old Opera House—down Main Street—

with all the people she knew below her—

then towards the gently flowing river—

that seemed to flow into the sunset—

toward which she soared—she lingered

with us on that image—as if she had said

enough—then—my uncle talked about

his recurring dream—he's going to be

in a play—but no one's bothered

to rehearse the scenes—he's standing

in the wings waiting to go on—he doesn't

know what he will say—all through this

my father is silent—he is closest to death—

we all know this—we forgive him his silence—

his silence—has his presence—as in a dream.

QUOTE: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens." ~ Carl Jung

Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

I've been saving this brilliant essay from one of my favorite columnists for the appropriate time - given Patty's lovely and thought-provoking post yesterday, today feels right for sharing... :-)

Labor Day musings tomorrow - god, it was wonderful to have a three-day weekend!

The Hippies Were Right!
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect
by Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's happening right now in the newly "greening" America and don't say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I'm talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the right thing to do" (read: It's purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don't start caring they'll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it's true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here's a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation -- has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation's incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you're really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there: Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane" and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that might be due to all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

SONG: Woodstock by Joni Mitchell

BOOK: Original Whole Earth Catalog, Special 30th Anniversary Issue by Peter Warshall, Stewart Brand (Editors)

POEM: Before the Snake by Nathaniel Tarn

Sitting, facing the sun, eyes closed. I can hear the
sun. I can hear the bird life all around for miles.
It flies through us and around us, it takes up all
space, as if we were not there, as if we had never
interrupted this place. The birds move diorami-
cally through our heads, from ear to ear. What
are they doing, singing in this luminous fall. It is
marvelous to be so alone, the two of us, in this
garden desert. Forgotten, but remembering
ourselves as no one will ever remember us. The
space between the trees, the bare ground-sand
between them, you can see the land's skin which
is so much home. We cannot buy or sell this
marvelous day. I can hear the sun and, within
the sun, the wind which comes out of the world's
lungs from immeasurable depth; we catch only
a distant echo. Beyond the birds there are per-
sons carrying their names like great weights.
Just think: carrying X your whole life, or Y, or Z.
Carrying all that A and B and C around with you,
having to be A all the time, B, or C. Here you can
be the sun, the pine, the bird. You can be the
breathing. I can tell you, I think this may be
Eden. I think it is.

QUOTE: "The world needs dreamers, and the world needs doers, but what the world needs most is dreamers that do."

Act Naturally (The Beatles)

Headed to the movie in a few minutes for Date Night with my husband - given my week away and then subsequent scramble to catch up, we've had a hit-and-run relationship for the last three weeks. It will be nice to relax with a nice romantic comedy, and a bite to eat afterwards... with some good getting-each-other-up-to-speed conversation - the one-on-one evening is long overdue... <3

SONG: Act Naturally by The Beatles

BOOK: Myth & the Movies: Discovering the Myth Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films by Stuart Voytilla

POEM: The Movies by Billy Collins

I would like to watch a movie tonight

in which a stranger rides into town

or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,

danger visited upon the citizens of the town

by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person

on his or her long hazardous journey—

it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,

and not much danger lies in watching

a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home

than walk out in the cold to a theater

and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down

with the bed hitched up to the television

the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses

so the movie could pull me along

the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm's way

by identifying with the characters

like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,

the fellow who knows enough to duck

when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster

in the movie about the perilous journey,

the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,

and hands up a heavy satchel

to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,

waving the all-clear to the engineer.

Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.

And at the end of the day

I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,

my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—

Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

QUOTE: "Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." ~ Gloria Steinem