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Peace is the best Mother’s Day gift
Old Photos
it’s strange looking at old photos of myself before i knew i had a self to know
hill, grass, sky, home, brother, sister, and yet no words for anything
Toronto SFF Interviews: James Downe with Sharon Rivest
A Child is a Child
No child is a “human animal” but they die as a result of our inhumanity.
The violence has to stop. You don’t end violence by being violent, by encouraging violence or supporting violence, you end it by making a commitment to non-violence regardless of fear for you own safety, the opinions of others, and your own comfort and prosperity.
Life gives you lemons
How wonderful!
The Clear Button
a short story
As soon as she woke her first thought was always which button to push.
She liked The Blue Button because that would dispense the blue pill which gave her a blue-sky way of looking at things. She’d settle back into her soft chair and imagine all the possibilities. That was good for half a day.
She liked the Green Button too because that pill made her feel fresh and she could run around and clean: Get all the food waste in the green bin, dishes in the dishwasher, laundry sorted, what needed to be presoaked, soaking. While the machines were going, she could shine the shiny surfaces, re-organize her drawers and then, once the laundry was done, iron smooth everything that could be ironed. She had a really good time. The green pill gave her a feeling of accomplishment that would last for two days.
The Black Button dispensed the black pill which made her sleep a deep, solid sleep that she knew she really, really, really, times ten to the power ten, needed. And sometimes that was good for a week.
She liked all the buttons. She liked all the pills.
She especially liked the Purple Button saved for special occasions and weekends because it dispensed the purple pill that made her see gods and goddesses and flowers taller than tall buildings and giant butterflies and herself as the beautiful creature that was made of pure love—The Pink Button, that dispensed the pink, silly-laughing pill for long chats with friends—the Checkered Button was for the checkered pill that made her smart so she could fix things and sell them on-line when she needed extra credit for shopping—she liked The Red Button because of the red pill, but she was shy so it was discretely hidden under her bed.
But then there was The Clear Button. She had never pushed it. She wasn’t sure why except it seemed more dangerous than anything she could ever do in her entire life, even more dangerous than going a whole day without pushing any buttons at all.
She thought, perhaps, maybe, she’d seen someone do this—push the clear button, but it was hard for her to think about because, whoever they were, they were gone. Simply vanished. As if some gigantic hand just swooped in and removed them.
No. She would not push the clear button.
She would push the Green Button.
After taking the green pill she re-potted her potted plants and she went on line and ordered more. Then she ordered a yoga matt, signed up for some on-line classes in meditation, donated to a charity and as soon as everything was delivered (rush) arranged all her new plants and the numerous bronze statues of various deities in front of the clear button until you could no longer see it. She felt a great sense of spiritual calm and accomplishment that lasted for two days. On the third day she pushed the black button.
A week later she woke and before getting out of bed, she thought about the clear button. She wished she could remember who it was that she had known who pushed it. It was like an itch in her brain. There was no pill to take care of the feeling. No button to push.
She sat up, swatting away the enormous fronds of greenery. She crawled under the low hanging foliage and arrived at the alter of the numerous deities and knocked them aside and found the clear button and pushed it.
And nothing happened.
There was no clear pill.
She just sat there.
Original Face
“Show me your original face, the face you had before your mother and father were born.”
It is a Zen koan.
The circumstances of our lives lead to this and that, and on, and on, in all directions. And when we hear of the direction some people’s lives take, we have to wonder. For example, how could an old man go into a dance hall and kill a bunch of old people, his peers, while they were doing nothing other than just learning to ballroom dance? What brought him to such a state of congealed anger that he could do something so terrible?
When I am looking forward to my children’s future and the lives of their children and then looking back to when they were new babies, and then thinking of all the life that was before, all the family stories, all of that, and trouble and struggle and sorrow well I know anything can happen.
And yet here I am. Here you are.
My house of cards will be swept away. It has been swept away before, more than once. And it will go along with the last breath of air from my lungs, just as it should. Trying to try to carve any history in stone or lock into a belief for the future, horrible or wonderous, these things are all delusions and all evaporate in the brilliance of this moment.
“Original Face” is not your face or my face. It’s not even what we think of as Buddha, or Jesus or God. It is when this house of cards falls away and we wake up as a human being here, before all our thinking about it.
I woke up this morning early, thinking I would try to sleep longer because I have a busy day ahead. I’d not been sleeping and was just mulling over things, lying in bed. In the dim light of my room, through the bedroom door I saw, in the dim light of the living room, the framed photo that hangs on the wall in the dining area.
Suddenly I saw my life, viewed from one room looking at another room and through that room to another, on and on and ending with a photograph hanging on a wall that I couldn’t even see. It might as well have been a portrait of an artist, or a pipe, or temple.
But I understood.
So, I got up and did what needed to be done. And then I wrote this.
Words About 