The Joy of Mud

Summer is Earth on your Hands and Clay on your Feet.
There is a Gentle River that calls, making the journey sweet.

There’s something about connecting to the Planet we stand on; to the earth that yields our food, to the elements that make up the bread and bones of our physical existence.

The world we live in has become a maze of blinking lights and beeping appliances, taking us on a journey farther and farther away from our source, our origins, our internal drum-beat.

We amaze ourselves – again and again – by the return to Simple Roots, the immersion and re-immersion in the Sound of Us, the Place We Sprang From, the Fountain of Familiar Song that echoes deep in our own caverns.

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A Journal from Jules: The Maestro of Peace

Palmero, Italy, July 2008

Hi Folks…

I am typing in the dark back of my hotel room in Palermo so as not to wake my room-mate. The computer will go with her today and I want to get this to you, so I am writing. I cannot read my notes in this light, so I will start again so I can share with you – and savor my own memories, while fresh – of this amazing event which unfolded as a tale of old.

Corleone is not city like Palermo — indeed it is a small town. The bus ride took about 1 and 1/4 hours and way route was lined with grapevines and hay-fields, beautiful mountains and a picturesque countryside.

Grown men baling and stacking hay waived at our bus, the way children wave to train engineers in rural areas. The town square – named for two men who were shot because they stood up to the Mafia – was smaller than a football field.

Chairs had been brought in and some bleachers at the back. They said this important event could have been held indoors, but that they wanted it in the open air where all who wished to could come. Their sincerity and genuine affection for Mr. Prem Rawat was evident and very touching.

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I’m asking you, please

Lift me high,

Lift me high,

’til my fingertips touch the sky

I’m asking you

please,

lift me high.

clouds & sky

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Begging for Peace

On my recent journey to Israel, one of the oddities of Tel Aviv was the sighting of the occasional beggar on the street. These seemed to take 3 forms: old women sitting beside lamp-posts, elderly hasidic pan-handlers with a bit of a crazy edge, and young penitents who situate themselves in a state of frozen prostration, on the leeward side of walkways.

This is an strange sight to see.

In North American cities, begging and pan-handling are synonymous – considered by the more cozy financially to be one of society’s major blights, sore spots.

The poor and the beggars have always been with us, in one form or another — at least in the so-called “civilized” societies of the post-tribal world. One imagines that in “tribal” times, all people had meaningful roles to play in societies where life wasn’t measured by accumulation and prestige.

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Wired For Life

The Internet Cafe.

Wireless Wonderful Life.
Music is almost as old as Smell, in the category of Primitive Sensations.

Notes To Live ByOk, it’s like this: it takes you for a ride. And it can be a very sweet sensation. We humans are such a mix of sensibilities: memory, emotion, intellect, intelligence, intuition, silent knowing, dreaming. And our brains, our whole beings are so amazingly developed to savour sensation, to ‘parse’ the delicate labyrinth of “enjoyment”.

Kind of like food, and the art of “tasting”; we’re so wired for pleasure. You know how food seduces you the moment you walk into the house: that definite, even if faint, fragrance in the air. Someone’s been making home-made bread, and the sweet cotton of roasted wheat and butter sends its fingers on a mission: to find You! And the honing in, we move down the hall and the aroma becomes seductive, perhaps mingled with the gentle clanking of cookware. Everything in us stands at attention – the sweet soldiers of Appreciation, trained as early as cradle-babes in mother’s pantry.

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Substance

I recall in the Early Days of My Life …

I was Looking for Something, without
realizing I was Looking for Something.

In high-school, I hung out with a group of distracted mischevious trouble-makers. One evening, I sat down with a good friend amidst beer, cigarettes and Jim Morrison, and we began to talk. Somehow, our conversation drifted from the ‘usual’, high-school-age-kid-stuff, to stuff a little more ethereal and abstract.

We began talking about Time, about Space. About our place in the Universe. About the Apparent Emptiness of Things, the Vastness of the Unexplored.

I remember my Ears pricking up, like a German Shepard who finally hears a long-lost Voice.

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