Instant Karma

If this looks like Elsie the Borden Cow tripping at a Grateful Dead concert, then the 60s were good to you. (and yes, I know Instant Karma is a Beatles song, and not by the Dead) It's actually a mash-up of the detail on a donkey cart outside the Italian pavilion at Epcot. Hee Haw! In this blog, I try to celebrate the exceptional in the commonplace -- the magic in the mundane, particularly the simple pleasures of "The Good Stuff." My search for simple beauty often sends my thoughts racing backward down the neural backroads to the funky tin-roofed shack where I keep my childhood. Not that I ever lived in a tin-roofed shack -- I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles -- I just keep my memories there, because when I visit, I like the sound of the rain on the roof. This journey is fraught with magical thinking. To the point that a simple picture of a Sicilian donkey cart, sparks a memory of a simple children's story, that turned out to be not so simple and I am reminded afresh how so much of what we believe is not based on fact, but on faith, fear, greed, assumption, position, privilege and ignorance. These thoughts have been front and center for me, as we, as a nation, struggle to understand the causes and cures of this prolonged recession, and cast stones at the faith of other people's fathers, because the splinter in our brother's eye is so much easier to see than the plank in our own. If we were to turn the mirror on ourselves for a moment, strip away the magical thinking that allows us to alchemize our own fear and greed into righteous indignation, I think we'd see that religious atrocities cross all faiths, racism knows no color, and greed no political affiliation. Go ahead, you think about that. I'm going to sit here in my shack, listening to the rain on the roof, strumming my dusty guitar and singing songs from my childhood: "Take a look at yourself and you can look at others differently . . ."

And for those of you who came here because of the Grateful Dead reference, I don't want you to go away empty-handed: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/

The good stuff:

Paying for a soldier's breakfast

talking to family

glimpses of the person your teenager will become

The Bill of Rights

a walk in the park

the silence of snow

noodlehead stories

Wikipedia

seeing the original

potable water

Squeally Fun!

I don't know how old I was when I stopped chasing pigeons, but judging from the look on this girl's face, I'm really missing out. It reminds me of the kid in the animated movie Despicable Me with Steve Carell, squeezing a stuffed animal and growling with unsuppressable joy: "It's soooooooo FLUFFY!" Kids experience a whole higher plane of fun. I call it "squeally fun" -- a kind of joyous abandon adults rarely attain. Even the chest-bumping, fist-pumping excitement of athletic competition carries the weight of contracts, endorsements, dominance and despair. With kids, there's no ulterior motive. It's pure stimulus and unbridled response -- to motion, color and sound -- "ooh shiny!" Left to their own devices, kids meet, greet and network far better than adults. There are no strangers, only kids they know and kids they haven't met yet. When they meet, they get right down to business, sharing likes and dislikes openly and honestly, looking for something fun they can do together without regard for race, creed, weight, gender preference, or affliction. Kids look for ways to get along. It's adults that teach them things like "girl games" and "boy games," and the dysfunction grows from there like sugar crystals on a string. As I watched the sickening circus of ego masquerading at religion at Dove World Outreach Center up the road here in Gainesville, I tried to picture the Reverend Terry Jones as a child, chasing birds and sharing his raisins. I read about the school at his 50-member church, where kids are reportedly sequestered from the world and pack furniture that he and his wife sell over the Internet, when he's not talking about burning the Koran (Quran), how his daughter had broken with the church, calling it a cult, and how another church he'd started in Germany, now won't have anything to do with him. I wondered what had gone so bad wrong in his life that he would work so hard to foment fear and hate. Yesterday there was talk he wouldn't do it. He himself has said he wouldn't do it, if the President called him -- attention which, I have to suspect, is at the heart of this little donkey diving show. Peace to all, and as we remember those who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, my wish for the world is that we will take a lesson from the children we fight and die for, and celebrate all the things we have in common. Because the real lesson of 9/11 is not about Islam verus Christianity, Ismael versus Isaac -- both sons of Abraham -- but about the damage that can be caused by small-minded zealots like Terry Jones and Osama Bin Laden, who claim devine sanction for their self-agrandizing bigotry, ego and fear. If God is LOVE, as we so often hear, then maybe we should spend the next day chasing birds and praying for healing and brotherhood instead of revenge.

The good stuff:

squeally fun

tree forts

songs around the campfire

homemade mini-golf

hide and seek

hopscotch

Hungry Hungry Hippos

Silly String

Silly Putty

jumprope

PB&J

naps