The Afternoon Rush

I Lost My Head
This Hour
Thinking of You
Remembering Me
Courting the Distance
Forgetting To See

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.

now

allow.
this has come to you.
to stay.

Wired For Life

The Internet Cafe.

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

Ok, 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.

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.