time is spiral not square

on the stunning luna press calendar, which my friend K gave me. It's the most gorgeous calendar I've ever seen. It charts the year in 13 lunations - moon cycles - rather than the conventional 12 months of the Gregorian calendar. Shows each one in spiral patterns of days of the moon, with the times of rising and setting. And a wealth of other information, art, goddess-lore.

Get one. Even though the year's half-gone, you won't regret it. And I can guarantee you'll want to give at least one of next year's to someone as a gift.

the truth of our lives

is what we do. Not what we know, believe, hope, intend, plan, think, say, or even dream. In the end, it's about the acts that fill the hours of our days, the days of our lives.

I once read somewhere that when you're seeking a teacher, for anything, don't look for the person who knows the most. How much they know is less relevant than how fully they have integrated what they do know. Seek out the person who genuinely lives what they teach. Who shows no disconnect between their word and the way they are in every aspect of their life.

4am

is when my niggling fears loom largest, and I'm most vulnerable to them. You know the kind:

- I bet that twinge in my tooth is an incipient root canal,
- My father's knee pain is going to cripple him within a year,
- My 401K is as good as gone because the stock market is a seething mass of corruption and insider trading,
- The next tsunami will hit East Africa and wipe out my whole country,
- Everything I eat is so full of pesticides and toxins, there's no chance I can avoid cancer,
- What makes me think I can produce a show by autumn?

I've tried going back to sleep.
I've tried tensing and relaxing each muscle.
I've tried tonglen.

The only thing I know that works - and yet I continue to resist it - is to get out of bed and get my body moving. Fear is paralysed energy that needs to be put into motion. The more I stay still and try to tamp it down, the more it builds. Once I move, it flows into ideas, solutions, connection to the world around me. Dissolves into endorphin-spiked-laughter at my internal scaremonger.

if you still believe in the myth of free trade

Check out the latest issue of Pambazuka News, which has a special focus this week on trade and justice.

It asks:

If free trade is the answer, why is health care a luxury
for millions in Kenya? Why does the oil trade wreak havoc in the
Niger Delta? How is it that informal traders have virtually no
rights? Why are local communities excluded from development projects
driven by multi-national companies? Why is it that cotton farmers in
West Africa suffer because of a grossly unfair subsidy racket?

drunk on summer tonight

the narcotic scent of datura under the slender curve of a two-day-old moon.