Offering for a Neighbor’s Holiday Gathering

Almond Fruitcake with Buttered Calvados Glaze, Culinary Bay (from my potted tree, currently inside), crimson crisp apple from Eastern Market

Almond Fruitcake with Buttered Calvados Glaze, Culinary Bay (from my potted tree, currently inside), crimson crisp apple from Eastern Market
Yesterday, I took the plunge and joined Facebook. I’d read one too many articles in the New York Times about it without being able to really understand what I was reading. What an interesting phenomenon — seeing images and reading words of friends and acquaintances through space (friends around the world) and time (friends from way back).
Tomorrow, I will be speaking on a webcast to more than a 1,000 people.
I’ve gotten thousands of hits on this blog.
This is a lot of shared energy without knowing most of those with whom one I am sharing. It is shifting space and time as I think about it. In the computer world, we say or write about what we are thinking as we type or speak into the computer, and then our words and energies shift and take on their own power as they extend out instantly to anyone who chooses — intentionally or randomly — to receive them.
I think the more we are in the ethereal world, the more we need simultaneously to make certain we are grounded.
Several years ago, when I still had a working art studio in my house, the favorite thing to do of a friend’s child when the family came over was to go into the studio to see what I was painting. I had just finished a piece on which I had painted the words, “Sometimes I have nothing to say.” D was five or six at the time — just learning to read full sentences. He chortled delightedly, pointed to the painting, and exclaimed, “I get it! I get it!”
As I have been studying and contemplating yoga philosophy in a group setting recently, I have been thinking about the tension between saying and not saying, the conundrum of yearning to communicate the indescribable, and the countervailing desire just to experience and not to try and describe or communicate.
I had a delightful chat with artist Quest Skinner out at Eastern Market today. I was quite attracted to the clear-headed Buddha and called it that. Quest held up the cloudy-headed Buddha and relayed a story of having given a friend from Burning Man one with a clear head and one that was clouded. I took the two together and asked Quest, who had said to another customer that though out of cards would make one, to make me a card. This is what it says:
