IT WILL RETURN TO BEING STRANGE

 Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah,

peace and blessing be upon him, said:

Islam began as something strange and it will return

to being strange, so blessed are the strangers.

Since my school days, reality had been a puzzle to me, and existence a riddle that I could not decode. I had had early experiences of seeing and feeling ghosts and other unexplained phenomena. This led me to think that perhaps, rather than these being illusions, it was not a mechanistic universe, as traditional Cartesian science would have it, but something far more subtle, complex and even intelligent. It was impossible to understand its origins and purpose by direct observation, so I had to believe—either in science or in an intelligent creator. Reading about the subatomic world convinced me that the universe was a construct, a giant Meccano set—but who built it, and why? Morality seemed very important in this world too. Why all the duality, why all the good versus evil?

— Richard Thompson, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975, Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 2021

I just found this very interesting. Not knowing very much about Islam, I still found it fascinating that Thompson was a Sufi. Most of his music is vivid, anecdotal, narratively driven, so I still wonder how Sufism feeds his music. In the guitar solos, I can see god, so I figure RT sees her, too. This volume does not answer very much at all and I hate the copy editing.

There is a large orange cat with runny eyes and a boogery nose deigning to clean himself just beyond this laptop. Our neighbors said our cats were dirty. Goes to show what they know about cats. These cats are cleaner than they are, even if they do take the occasional dirt bath (Vera's speciality).

Yoga teaching was fun and pretty easy today. I will bet they are a little sore tomorrow. Again, so much to learn about recognizing folks' limits and when to push them. The relief some of them have to just be exercising (a little) is palpable in their expressions. They are quite eager and then all chuffed at the end that they did some yoga. I taught them their first asana today, Tadasana. I am spending a lot of time working on alignment and their feet today. Joe said he missed doing the shoulder work, so I will try to get some of that in on Thursday.

Other than that, today was Shelly's last day working with me for awhile as she got a full-time job, which is so great. There is still a lot to do, but I have learned to sand and refinish and paint and wax and that is the mode at the moment. The library floor is coming along and I think I am going to do a bit of decorating.

Tomorrow should be a garden day as I evidently ordered some more bulbs and I need to get them in the ground. 

My sleeping meds just kicked in.

AND ALL COMES AS BEFORE

— Martin Buber, The Legend of Baal-Shem

So why do we want to go

if this travel is

so without profit

if not even a souvenir pebble

lodges in a boot waffle

or a half ticket sticks

in the corner of a pocket

if it is so perfect

that it takes every tick

of its private clock back

patting us down at the exit

like a bank dick

pushing us back into traffic?

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It, New and Selected Poems, Grove Press, New York, 2010