Eco-Tawashi!

I made them myself.

House-Inna-Woods

Here's what it actually looks like.

a Folly-Under-Construction set in a lovely forest...a good place to sit and think long thoughts.
Today whilst adding more tarpaper i reminded myself of the old joke:
"why are you up on the roof in this rain?"
"fixing the roof where it leaks"
"why not wait til it stops raining?"
"because the roof don't leak when it's not rainin'!"

this post is dedicated to OutaSpaceman, who sings the Anthem of places like this. He's quite good.

Star Fort

Words cannot express my joy at discovering such things exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort

this is what my house is gonna look like.

The Bible and Stuff

So this is an ongoing project for some of my friends that are "recovering Christians" so to speak, who have found that religion to be unpalatable, exclusionist, & generally not representative of their selves & souls.
So they won't be forever unmoored from what was a meaningful tradition during many of their formative moments, I'm going to point out some of my favorite Bible verses, the ones that ring true in my life. Winnowing the good from the bad is a life skill, so the next post on this theme will be the points i find most contentious & in need of updating & improving. That's right Sirs and Madams of my anonymous internet audience, I intend to start some arguments!

(cheering, tossing of hats into the ether)

I'm hoping the whole thing will be cathartic and healing. I once met an angry young man on the internets, could tell you all day long why he was shaking his fist at God, but hadn't yet got to the point of believing in anything else he could express. Here, maybe, are some raw materials from which to create.

 & there will be some fun bits, too, like when I was 6 years old and they told me Jesus would go everywhere with me if I believed in Him, so when I rode in the car I tried to buckle the seatbelt for Him so He wouldn't get killed if we had a wreck, even tho i didn't really think he could get killed but anyway I went to put His sealtbelt on, and this is the really crucial part of the story THE SEATBELT WAS FLAT AGAINST THE SEAT!!! Like there was nobody sitting there at all! I was OK with Jesus being invisible and all, but total incorporeality? my childish faith furrowed its brow and said Hmmmm...

And there are other hmm-inducing bits as well, like this which i found on Wikipedia:
....1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,^[8] in which they asserted:

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience – exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity? We do not think so. In fact, we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels, and of established Christianity, is ultimately incomplete – a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.^[8]

Copypasta is my favorite kind of pasta.  But please, discuss. These are big things and i wish to understand them.

Met the Neighbors

So I'm building a House-In-The-Woods, have been working on it for several years. When it's done it will look similar to this:

Minus the greenhouse part, & the door is red w/ pineapples, and it's not tudor, it's sandstone and cinderblock. The windows are made of bottles & there aren't any in front and the roof is not nearly so complete, BUT ANYWAY, it's similar to this.

It is a place to go for taking Space and for making Magic. It's the very biggest thing I've ever built & i'm justifiably proud of it.

So when i got there today and found PEOPLE had been there i was rather upset.

Mind you it is just sitting out there in the middle of the forest, but that's WHY nobody's supposed to go there. Somebody had left big muddy tiretracks in the driveway, and a tiki torch which they won't be getting back. Some of my knick -knacks were moved, AND they'd torn open the big trash bag full of paper-to-burn and burned it in the firepit, probably while sitting in my chair (!).

Could've been worse, but STILL.

SO i snatched up the tiki torch & took myself down the road to where i knew people were and asked what happened & if they'd seen anything.

 "No nothing at all, nary a peep!"

Anyway i left, & soon after that the neighbors came walking down to my house-in-the-woods where i was sitting in My Chair watching paper burning in My Firepit. They each had a Coke & they brought one for me as well. Their names are Zack(the esquire of the neighboring property since his father passed away) and his friend Bill. Their pit bull is named Doobie, interpret that how you will. They wished to reassure me that they hadn't disturbed anything & would keep an eye out for interlopers. I told them i didn't mind people passing through but that there were limits. We compared tattoos, praised the un-Hot weather, discussed Zack's Old Lady whom I had previously met. They informed me I was 'Cool as Hell'.

We'll see.

Imaginary Friends

life theory & ground rules

=+<(%{ SHIT HAPPENS }%)>+=

this is a durable, widely applicable concept. I enjoy it obviously for the profanity, and because it addresses the inevitability that Everybody Poops.
Butt the far-reaching beauty of it is how it frees the soul from Drama.

Bad things happen, and it's nobody's fault*, LET IT GO.
Making others responsible for every awful life experience makes it *LESS* easy to process & heal from, and keeps my monkeybrain churning with all kinds of negativity. NOBODY IS ABLE TO RUIN MY LIFE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.
*even if it is somebody's fault, if it's not worth the trouble of breaking their kneecaps, or worth the expense of hiring someone to do it, it's just not worth worrying about.

And the evil twin to "it's somebody else's fault", is that every joy that happens, is somebody else's responsibility. I've felt the weight of that, and don't wish it on another soul. I can be happy without hanging my expectations on anybody. NOBODY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MY HAPPINESS OR MENTAL HEALTH BUT ME.

I WILL NOT TAKE PART IN *ANY* RELATIONSHIP THAT REQUIRES ME TO DEFEND MYSELF.
I can defend my point of view all day long, for fun or mental exercise. Or i can just drop it, if it's not worth the trouble, or agree to disagree.
I've been at a point where i needed to pick a fight, any fight, just so i could win. I've welcomed Anger because it made me feel powerful, like a quasar blasting waves of rage, like i could *MAKE* people feel what i was going through. I've stood in the yard screaming AH HAY CHOO, YEW BASSTERD. It didn't do any good, just sucked energy away from my life.
I've been there. I'm not going back. There is nothing there that I want or need.

THERE IS *NO* PLACE IN MY LIFE FOR THE SILENT TREATMENT. I've been on both ends of it, and SERIOUSLY. It is not a worthy behavior for any situation I care to be in. It solves nothing, it presumes control in place of communication. Interactions with fellow humans will be based on the premise that my intentions are good. Apologies will be offered freely for real or perceived slights, but not in laundry-list form in hopes of guessing the problem. I'm not going to slog through anybody's psychodrama just for the privilege of explaining myself.

I WILL NOT FEED THE DRAMA MONSTER. I refuse to redirect one particle of energy from any aspect of my life. There may well be a gold watch at the bottom of that sewer, but I'm sure as Hell not jumping in.


Probably a rather dull read, but i've just turned 30 and am still sorting these things out. *results not typical, your mileage may vary* #thatisall

I have nothing new to report

it continues to be dreadfully Hot. it was hot on the trip down to Texas and equally hot on the way back. My driving arm got sunburned: (

I went to the cemetary and made rubbings of my mom's parents headstones. All my rechargeable batteries are now defunct so i cannot take any pictures but they look like this:

     RONALD EUGENE SHEPARD            HILDEGARD SHEPARD
         E 6                         ARMY                     BELOVED WIFE
              WORLD WAR II                                      1922 ---1989
                  1923---1985      
Like that. The bronze part of the headstones was so hot i didn't really need to do any rubbing; the crayon melted to the paper in the high relief spots.

I've been giving some thought to Nietzche and his quote

"One must still have Chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing Star"

They say he was rotten through with syphilis but maybe there's some meaning to be found there. Caligula supposedly had it too and he had some great ideas. Like sending the Roman army out to gather seashells. Sounds fun, and there'd be a nice sea breeze.

Planetesimals are a size zmaller than planetoids, which are also called dwarf planets (or plutoids, after erstwhile planet Pluto).

The Japanese word for sponge is tawashi. I think it sounds like to washy which makes it easy to remember. Eco-tawashi means a sponge knitted or crocheted from acrylic yarn. I can make those.