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