echoes of the spheres

Well, the government finally came to a compromise, which was necessary. It will be interesting to see how or if we recover from this point. Maybe I'm growing a bit more skeptical with age but I kind of feel like this this is happening too much over our heads for us to pull out of this quickly or gracefully...the awkwardness of the squirming in this video is almost unbearable.

Now, to move out of awkward and into the sweet pool of inspiration, let's talk about music! I have music on the brain for huge chunks of most days, but I've been carrying it around with me literally now that I've finally conquered my ridiculous tech fear of the Ipod...I can keep a blog but can't work an Ipod? Well, apparently, I can work an Ipod and, since overcoming this strange doubt (thank you, Steven!), it's been glued to my hip almost constantly...on walks around campus, while cleaning houses, at the gym, even while just sitting at home because there's something truly wonderful about submerging yourself into total headphone land!

On some other musical musings, technology has now enabled us to SEE piano notes. Be sure to click on the interactive keyboard on that page and make your own orbs! The still images captured look strikingly like some of Emoto's water crystals.

Also, in a technique called "stellar seismology", scientists have been recording the sounds of various stars, including our sun. Take a listen, especially to the "star song" on the third link from the top.

All of these star songs and piano bubbles remind me of this verse by Lord Byron:

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

I agree with him. There's music in all things. Though I haven't been playing nearly as much intentional music lately...taking a bit of a hibernation to generate some new ideas...I'm alternately and deeply enjoying headphone land and the humming, cracking, gurgling, tweeting, and buzzing of dishwashers, birds, roads, ceiling fans, lightbulbs, and the like.

presidential address/what we can do

Man, say what you will about Obama, but I think he delivered this very well. I think taking his advice and contacting our representatives is a good move for everyone. In my very politically savvy friend, Alexa's words, "Congress is publicly considering defaulting to prevent Obama from being re-elected. This amounts to throwing us all under the bus for the sake of the ambitions of one political party. 10% decrease in social security checks immediately, lost value in government savings bonds, devalued 401ks. Not patriotic, not ethical, not ok: find your rep's number here and CALL now. Here's a link to the Texas District List. In addition, here's a direct list of Name Party Room Phone Committee Assignments:

1 Gohmert, Louie
R 2440 RHOB 202-225-3035 Judiciary
Natural Resources
2 Poe, Ted
R 430 CHOB 202-225-6565 Foreign Affairs
Judiciary
3 Johnson, Sam
R 1211 LHOB 202-225-4201 Ways and Means
4 Hall, Ralph M.
R 2405 RHOB 202-225-6673 Science, Space, and Technology, Chairman
5 Hensarling, Jeb
R 129 CHOB 202-225-3484 Financial Services
6 Barton, Joe
R 2109 RHOB 202-225-2002 Energy and Commerce
7 Culberson, John
R 2352 RHOB 202-225-2571 Appropriations
8 Brady, Kevin
R 301 CHOB 202-225-4901 Ways and Means
9 Green, Al
D 2201 RHOB 202-225-7508 Financial Services
10 McCaul, Michael T.
R 131 CHOB 202-225-2401 Ethics
Foreign Affairs
Homeland Security
Science, Space, and Technology
11 Conaway, K. Michael
R 2430 RHOB 202-225-3605 Agriculture
Armed Services
Ethics
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
12 Granger, Kay
R 320 CHOB 202-225-5071 Appropriations
13 Thornberry, Mac
R 2209 RHOB 202-225-3706 Armed Services
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
14 Paul, Ron
R 203 CHOB 202-225-2831 Financial Services
Foreign Affairs
15 Hinojosa, Rubén
D 2262 RHOB 202-225-2531 Education and the Workforce
Financial Services
16 Reyes, Silvestre
D 2210 RHOB 202-225-4831 Armed Services
Veterans' Affairs
17 Flores, Bill
R 1505 LHOB 202-225-6105 Budget
Natural Resources
Veterans' Affairs
18 Jackson Lee, Sheila
D 2160 RHOB 202-225-3816 Homeland Security
Judiciary
19 Neugebauer, Randy
R 1424 LHOB 202-225-4005 Agriculture
Financial Services
Science, Space, and Technology
20 Gonzalez, Charlie A.
D 1436 LHOB 202-225-3236 Energy and Commerce
House Administration
21 Smith, Lamar
R 2409 RHOB 202-225-4236 Judiciary, Chair
Homeland Security
Science, Space, and Technology
22 Olson, Pete
R 312 CHOB 202-225-5951 Energy and Commerce
23 Canseco, Francisco
R 1339 LHOB 202-225-4511 Financial Services
24 Marchant, Kenny
R 1110 LHOB 202-225-6605 Ways and Means
25 Doggett, Lloyd
D 201 CHOB 202-225-4865 Budget
Ways and Means
26 Burgess, Michael
R 2241 RHOB 202-225-7772 Energy and Commerce
27 Farenthold, Blake
R 2110 RHOB 202-225-7742 Homeland Security
Oversight and Government Reform
Transportation and Infrastructure
28 Cuellar, Henry
D 2463 RHOB 202-225-1640 Agriculture
Homeland Security
29 Green, Gene
D 2470 RHOB 202-225-1688 Energy and Commerce
30 Johnson, Eddie Bernice
D 2468 RHOB 202-225-8885 Science, Space, and Technology
Transportation and Infrastructure
31 Carter, John
R 409 CHOB 202-225-3864 Appropriations
32 Sessions, Pete
R 2233 RHOB 202-225-2231 Rules

debt

The national debt crisis has been on my mind something fierce lately. In fact, it has snuck under my skin much more than most governmental issues usually are able to. It's led to a couple of little anxious bouts of considering how I can start guerrilla gardening around town, conserving water, and preparing for the next Depression...a bit extreme, I know...but not entirely impossible. And, mainly, it's led to a lot of long talks with friends about this financial pickle we're in. The history and political science classes I'm in right now are also keeping it on the forefront.

My history professor, specifically, is very inspiring and brings every issue we study into a very realistic and modern context. It can be easy to abstract wars and genocides and revolutions as these far off, fairytale (probably more like ghost story) issues. It's also easy to pack events of the past into convenient, isolated boxes rather than look at the global story. As I've been expanding my knowledge of and perspective on some of the largest events of the last few centuries and drawing parallels, I can't help but see that ol' "history repeating itself" time and again. Thinking about empires and governments scrambling to stay on top, whether in colonization, industrialization, or what have you just reminds me of how fragile we are and always have been.

I think that "Government" becomes this larger than life figure to us sometimes, whether we're fearing it, assuming its corruption and failure, or praising it and assuming its total power and our security in it. Government is just a bunch of little people, mostly men and a few women who have worked twice as hard to prove the worth of their gender, running around and either trying to make positive change or trying to scoop up more power. They are, in more ways than not, like us and when it comes to issues such as this debt crisis at hand, there's no "right answer".

The Great Depression spanned more than a decade and, naturally, because the U.S. is and has been one of the biggest kids on the playground, affected the economies and individual lives of people in almost every country in the world. I recently learned that, once the U.S. stock market crashed, we were forced to pull our financial aid back that we were pumping into other, hurting countries. One of the main beneficiaries of U.S. loans at the time was Germany. We can look back now and see the horrible, indirect part our Depression played in giving Hitler an opportunity. I'm not trying to get all Doomsday here, but it's crazy to realize and important to recognize the ripple effects that come from events like these. My great-grandparents and a couple of my grandparents lived during the Great Depression...it's not so far-removed as we might prefer to think.

Even more recent history was the 2008 Great Recession that spun out of the Global Financial Crisis, the worst since the 1930s. I remember the panic at the time, but I was fairly ignorant about the depth of what was occurring back then. We narrowly avoided another Depression and global economic collapse. So, everything happening today is not out of the blue. There are many, intelligent people thinking and writing about the crisis. I just don't think there are any easy answers. There are many factors involved in the economy and it's difficult to understand them all. This is a very pared down and easy to understand primer. Everything's better with animation! The next few days will be very interesting as we watch Obama and the House continue to battle it out. In the meantime, I'm going to take a deep breath, de-stress with my hula hoop, and start helping folks get the community garden off the ground in Huntsville that has slowly been in the works for a long time. :)

is the speed of light too slow for you?

It's good to have gratitude for all that we have. I've seen some beautiful cloud shows this week. One sunset walk with Danielle in a park in my neighborhood led to us getting lost and wandering around trails, watching pink and blue clouds, and sharing camp horror stories (I was constantly bullied and she was apparently a deft bully liar and convinced all of her little campmates that they were in constant, mortal danger of bobcats..among other things).

On another note, this is my favorite cover of this Cat Steven's tune, "How Can I Tell You", and it's been playing on my internal jukebox quite a bit lately.

sand, water, and dreams

I have to share this incredible article that my buddy Elam shared today. Who knew that sand was so beautiful?

Also, the uniqueness and beauty of each grain of sand reminded me of Masaru Emoto's studies on the reactions of water crystals to different emotions, intentions, music, or prayers. I remember seeing one of his volumes of Messages from Water several years ago and being really astonished at the beauty and symmetry in the molecular structures of water crystals imbued with positive intentions vs. the chaotic patterns in the negative ones.

Does anyone else see the little man holding a club in the hatred crystal? Anyway, these things are easily dismissed as hippy dippy fluff by many but I think they're important to take into consideration, especially considering the oceans of information we have yet to discover about science and energy and the ways they interset. It can't all be rainbows and unicorns but it also can't all be quantifiable data, in my opinion. I like to lean into the blurry space in the middle.

This unknowing zone is uncomfortable for many because we can't pin it down, define it, quantify it, put it in a box...this issue came up in my Jung class recently. The topic was dreams and we began discussing Jungian concepts of shared dreams (two people literally having the same dream in a night), psychic information being shared in dreams before an event happens, and the like. I've experienced all sorts of wonderful and weird phenomena in my dreaming time since I was a kid, so it doesn't feel alien or suspect to me. I can't define or explain most of it...I just know what I've experienced. Jung attributes some of the more mysterious and magical seeming elements of dreaming to his concept of the collective unconscious.

...I wrote this post 2 weeks ago and, for some reason, left it brewing in my draftbox until now. I'm not entirely sure where I was planning to go with the threads of thought above but I had a strange and special dream since writing it. I woke up 2 days ago, after a great night of slumber in a magical fort, with a deep sense of peace and a chant echoing in my head. It's not unusual for my dreams to sway my emotions as I emerge from them but they're usually also accompanied by countless images and events and scenes and locations and interactions that I can attempt to scribble down in my journal before I lose them but know that I can never fully capture. The feeling coming out of this dream was entirely different. It was as if the only thing occupying my dream mind all night was a chant, suspended in space, sung by a female voice that didn't sound like mine necessarily, but felt deeply familiar and like it alone held the whole fabric of the universe. It took me a minute to focus my mind after waking out of this sea of song and, once I tuned into the words I heard this:

"Immanuel" (repeated 3 times per cycle)

and, sung over that word,

"Not a sound, not a creature, not a place, not a teacher, not a sound, not a creature."

I really like the melodies of both parts...that feels weird to say but they definitely didn't come from my conscious mind, so I can easily enjoy and judge them as something separate.

I'm sure I've heard the word "Immanuel" in my life, but definitely not in recent history and I didn't know what it meant ("God is with us").

Sometime last year, I had a dream of a similar nature, where I woke up completely immersed in a chant of many voices, male and female, in very complex and shifting harmony singing, "doubt. dot. dot. pray". I didn't know exactly what to make of the dream in the moment and it was the first time, to my memory, that I'd experienced a chant dream like that. But it, like the one from a couple of mornings ago, really stuck with me and has lingered around my waking thoughts since.

I can't remember exactly what was happening in my life at the time of the first chant dream, but I can guarantee that I wasn't consciously thinking about my relationship with a higher power, contemplating stepping foot into a church again, or committing to prayer. But "doubt. dot. dot. pray"...it cracks me up now because it just seems to sum up, "I don't know what I'm doing here aargh and whatifwhatifwhatif..pray". That's a cycle that sounds very familiar. Prayer is something that I've adopted and incorporated into my life with a lot of intention and relative ease over the past few months. But it's good to remember to do it in doubting times. I always forgot the most fundamental things when I need them the most. I'll be recording both dream chants soon and I look forward to getting more insight into the most recent one after time has given me some perspective.

4th of July

It's nigh! It appears that what Americans appreciate most about this holiday, watching things explode in the sky, ain't gonna happen for Texans this year. I had a glimmer of hope when San Marcos brazenly announced that they were going to blow things up regardless of serious drought conditions, come Hell or high water. However, they have since decided that, since they were the only town in the area with a planned fireworks show, too many people from surrounding areas would come to town and overwhelm them. So, fireworks are off again. A friend shared this video this morning and it was a great start to my last day of the semester. Colbert summed up my sentiments real good n stuff.

my mama cray

My Mom has been providing some much needed and inadvertent comic relief this week with our ridiculous gchats. The combination of her personality plus the occasional awkwardness of type-chat led to this convo a couple nights ago. Alas, all of our well-placed emoticons wouldn't transfer. Just mentally stick them in there when and where you feel appropriate.

Just for reference:

• Tutu=my grandmother (mama's mama). She's part-mermaid and has her own special brand of cray...enjoys throwing rocks at buzzards off of her balcony at night, etc.
  
• my Mom was super anxious this week because she was getting a tooth pulled...(she got on gchat last night only to type, "I survived" and then sign off)
• LeAnne is my Mom's next door neighbor and best friend...feisty broad!
• the "anniversary" I mention is the upcoming 10 yr anniversary of my motorcycle wreck. 7/3 has been a "jinx day" for me since and I'm trying to break it this year without breaking myself.
  
• the metal chicken blog is something a co-worker sent for My Mom and Jim's anniversary last week
• Mystic is this hoity-toity all girls' summer camp that many of the ladies on my Mom's side of the family went to for years . On your first year, you draw a slip of paper out of a hat in a very big deal/sorting hart-esque ceremony. You either draw blue and are, for the rest of your Mystic years, on the Kiowa tribe or you draw red and are forever a Tonkawa. All my kin had been Tonks so I, naturally, drew blue. I also was mercilessly teased and ended up spending most of my time hiding out in the "Nut Hut"...the name of one of the cabins....with kinder and younger folk or generally spacing out during the many sporting activities that occurred during the day. The one thing that I remember really enjoying at the camp was the theatre hour! We put on a production of the Hobbit...I think...I really am not even sure about that detail. Alls I knows is I spaced out on my entrance cue to scramble onstage as some sort of extra dwarf and say one line and my poor parents had to sit through the whole production in the hot ass sun without the gratification of even that. Oh, Mystic! Anyhow, not totally surprisingly, I never returned after my first year of hazing...erm...summer fun. But my Mom went for a zillion years and, being a general beauty and badass, was voted Chief of the Tonkawas one year (basically hundreds of girls declare that you're the shit and then you rule the roost for the year) and won a ton of patches for diving and kicking ass and the like. I think she also served as a counselor there when she got older and I know that she went back for a reunion with ol' Mystic gals recently. The force is strong in her.
  
• Weston is my roommate and he is awesome.
• Ol' Gene was my grandpa...he passed when I was little, but he had one of the kindest hearts on the planet and I have great memories of him. He also, from what I hear, had quite the sense of humor.
• Bud has been my Mom's dentist since they became friends in the '70s, before I was even a blush on my mother's cheek.
  

I think that's all (much more than) you need to know.

Jim/Doni: If you need to tell friends who are rendezvousing with you for Tutu's that they need to take a raincheck because you've been dealing with your grandmother . . . do it! There's no reason to have 7 people here when you're exhausted.

me: no...I really need that time. Good family/friend/music/swimming time will be the best thing

I can always bring a bell with me and ring people to bring me drinks like a princess bitch

Jim/Doni: OK.. You definitely have more energy than I have.

me: haha...not always.

you'd better have your bell ready for Tuesday

Jim/Doni: Yeah, well, I'm the princess bitch for the dentist thing, so get in line. I told Jim I expect the tooth fairy at age 55 should bring a Lexus or something . . . of course when your tooth falls out at age 5, it doesn't cost $4,000.

So the tooth fairy will probably just put a note under my pillow saying, "Get another job!"

me: hahaha, so true

Jim/Doni: Speaking of bells, LeAnne brought us some gorgeous chimes. Gorgeous. The kind you strike with a mallet. 3 different tones.

me: yes. can't wait to see/hear them.

Jim/Doni: OK. Take care of yourself. That's the best thing you can do for ME. And for yourself. There's a contestant on Food Network Star that reminds us of Weston. Alas, I think he might get booted in the next week or so unless he gets his camera skills going.

me: aww dang. Weston's pretty fabulous. And he's so excited about the 4th.

I just want to make it there in one piece. This 10 yr anniversary is kinda freakin me out. That and the fact that my knee has been acting up a lot lately.

Jim/Doni: Good! Can't wait to see him. Did I send you the blog about the metal chicken for anniversary?

me: didn't they say I would need to get the screw removed at some point. Oh...I haven't read that yet! Thanks for reminding me.

Jim/Doni: Not "Good!" about your knee. Our messages crossed.

me: haha...I know

Jim/Doni: I think they just said if it bothered you you might.

me: man. I wonder how involved/painful/expensive that would be

not even gonna think about that until I have insurance again

Jim/Doni: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Jim/Doni: Girl, you better go get your papers written, and I better go to bed. I hate it that your AC is out. Kiss Grandbetty for me.

me: I will! love you.

Jim/Doni: xoxoxoxoxo. Can't wait to see you. But sleep as much as you can.

me: yes, will do. But not on the 4th!

Jim/Doni: OK. Nite.

me: nighty poo, don't poo in your nighty

Jim/Doni: That's a lot funnier when you're at Mystic than when you get old.

me: haha...nope. I tell Weston and any other friend who sleeps over that EVERY. NIGHT.

the legacy lives on

Jim/Doni: Yeah . . . .but . . . .

me: yes.....?

Jim/Doni: Never mind.

Hey, there is an article in the current Texas Monthly about Mystic.

me: tell me!

why can't I say that as a 30 yr old?

Jim/Doni: Oh , you can totally say it as a 30 year old!!!! But when your audience is a 55 year old, they may be thinking . . . it's right around the corner.

me: BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Jim/Doni: Not yet, though, I'm happy to say!!!!!!

me: What's right around the corner? The bathroom or the days of pooping the bed?

You're crazy. Go to bed.

and don't poop in it.

I'm saving this conversation forever.

Jim/Doni: Aggghhhh!
As Ol' Gene said, "Never trust a fart."

me: hahaha. Holy shit. No wonder I'm so cray cray.

Jim/Doni: Yep. It's in the Genes

me: I miss that Ol' Gene. Wish I could remember him better.

Jim/Doni: I'll regale you with stories about him till your ears fall off.

me: do it! And write them down. You're a good writer. Use it!

make a blog of crazy ass family stories

it'll be the next metal chicken

Jim/Doni: I know. I even crack myself up. Go write your papers.

me: hahaha. It's hard to when I'm laughing so hard. Ok, bye bye.

Jim/Doni: Bye bye Miss American Pie. I'm going to bed. I decided it's just as delusional to pretend tooth extraction day is like Christmas morning as it is to think it's like my death day. So I am SO LOOKING FORWARD to TUESDAY!!!!!!!

If you're gonna be delusional, might as well enjoy it, right?

me: yayyyy!!! Have fun with all the whacky gas.

Jim/Doni: You know I will. Although Bud won't be doing it. And his coke-bottle glasses are freaking hilarious staring at you through the nitrous.

me: oh my god. go. to. bed.!

Jim/Doni: Nite. Bye.