It's hard sitting in Georgia,
With the sun setting,
And knowing that Oregon is over there.


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Long ago, Bill Walton, in Portland, was God.

As it happened, at Christmas time at the Saturday Market, I was selling my wooden lamps, having a lot of fun.
Big crowds.
Being the brilliant barker, of course. I had an intelligent and motivated group of people in the booth and i was mesmerizing them with my presentation. Yet even as I held up my most beautiful lamp to them, I noticed that they were, in fact, looking over shoulder behind me.
Curious, I glanced around and there was Bill Walton and, even more importantly, his wife, who proceeded to buy a lamp.

I love women!

I don't remember if any of my intelligent and motivated gaggle bought also, but how could they not have?

I hope that Bill and his wife are still together, and that my lamp remains a part of their life.


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A bee falls into the water.
I can't let him die!
I flick him out onto the rocks.
He's still alive.
I don't want the Parthian archers to get to him, but I can do nothing but wait.
Brave bee!
I walk over and take a picture of him, hoping against hope.
I hear the thundering of hooves.
"Go, little friend, go!"
The sun is merciless, yet merciful also. It dries my friend's wings and, just before the Parthian arrows floe, he does.
Yes!


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The drive to Sarnath, from Varanasi, while only a distance of 10 miles, might as well be transcontinental. The calm of the forest of what once was called "the deer park" remains, even as the din of the ghats of Varanasi still echoes in my ears. The walk from the road where Panday leaves me, towards the small temple, is deserted. No one asking for anything! Not only that, but signs discouraging any giving or soliciting line the pathway.
The temple, though small yet ornate in naive way, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the great cathedrals of Christendom.
I am reminded of some of the churches in Italy built by the Franciscans, evoking some of the original simplicity of St Francis, who would have loved the deer park. This place, the site of Gotama Buddaha's first sermon (his Sermon on the Mount) and the birth of the Eight-fold path, the Middle Way, the way, not of self-abnegation, but of self-responsibility, is today honored with a few scruffy workers hacking at the unresponsive earth, attempting to replace a few bricks in front of large, green statues of Buddaha and his five original disciples.
This lack of grandeur seems to go to the heart of Buddaha's teachings. As St. Francis tore away at the rot of medieval Christianity, so Buddha excised from Hinduism, extreme asceticism and human sacrifice, the caste system and elaborate rituals. Though, just as Hinduism still has Varanasi, as lively as ever, so too, does Vatican City still flourish.
Somehow, the ability to balance the spinning plates of religious contradictions may well be one of humankind's more remarkable achievements.

What is religion other than humankind's ability, all evidence to the contrary, to hope against hope. And these religious cities are the embodiment and beacon to all of us, of that faith.


What is religion but humankind's ability to look nihilism in the eye and say "No!".


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The pattern
In the fallen camellia blossoms
Eludes me.


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I make no apologies for my mania for traveling the world. I am, beyond any other description of myself, a walker. I cant wait to arise in the morning, having spent the small, dark, private time before throwing off the blanket and touching the ground with my bare feet, deciding the day's itinerary. An itinerary as much of the mind as of the body, a stalwart twosome, one refusing to stay out of the other one's business.
The beginning of a day, the birth of an idea, the start of a soul's journey through life, what better description of the first step out the front door can there be.

Tempus fugit, but I walk.

Demand it, be damned it!

Breadth and depth brings dollars out of our pockets.

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Is infinity eternal?
Is infinitude eternal?
Is eternity infinite?
What's the relationship between them?
Why does it seem that there might be one?


Strangely, as I write this, I receive notice that my poem,
about numbers being infinite, has been added to someone's etsy site.



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I met a girl, much younger than me, on a walk downtown and she asked me for some money. "For a bus ride home", and as the bus station happened to be nearby, a not inconceivable request, but I still said "no".
I started to walk on and then turned back and asked her why she was asking me for money, in exchange for nothing. In effect, why was she begging?
I asked her if she had graduated from high school. She said, "yes".
"Why are you begging?" I asked insistently, and she replied, "God begged!".
I told her that I thought that she had gotten it wrong, that "God doesn't beg, but he helps those who help themselves".
She said that she was helping herself and I asked her how?
"By asking you for money" she said with a straight face.
I clapped her on the shoulder and said that I didn't imagine that that is what God meant.
She laughed and I laughed, and we parted.


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crow

Ever since I returned from India, I have been wrestling with the meaning of going in the first place.
Did I, as Sophie asked, "go to find a religion?", which, I suppose, motivated many of the other single travelers that I encountered. But I don't think that that's the reason I went to India, nor to Israel last year.
Religion, simply put, is complicated.
How far back does the religious impulse go?
Is it possible that the emergence of god-thinking coincides with the emergence of man's humanity?
It's almost as if the Hindus believe that, i.e., that Hinduism had no beginning apart from the beginning of Time.
Even Judaism admits that Jews started with Abraham, a mere 50 centuries ago.
Hindus speak in terms of thousands of centuries, definitely winning the numbers battle.
What with the Universe being considered to be 14 billion years old, and the U.S. debt being considered to be 14 trillion dollars, we are feeling more and more comfortable with very large numbers. In fact, the bigger, the more impressive.
Christianity, at 2000 years, or Islam, at 1300 years, seem puerile.
In India, walking by old men and old women sitting and staring nowhere in particular, nothing might have changed from an age and a half ago.
That "time can heal all wounds" reverberates throughout the Hindu universe, offering hope that even our greatest hurt, the severing of ourselves from our creator, might heal.
How long ago did that happen?
A thousand centuries?
Ten thousand?
When Prometheus stole the Fire?
When we, as apes, entered the ocean and emerged as humans?
Language. It all seems to come back to language.


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Religion: a human inclination, taken to the extreme, a human tragedy.
Gratefully, America, somehow, resists


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