honey and sting

So, my new home town has both Sam's Club and Costco, which I've heard are pretty much the same. I'd like to join one. Any opinions on one versus the other?

On Jack, the Doctor, grace, eternity, and love -- for EboniOrchid in the Help_Haiti auction. She asked for something on the theme of love, and the Doctor, and Jack.

(Love is) the Opening Door

"Love is the opening door.
Love is what we came here for.
No one could offer you more.
Do you know what i mean?
Have your eyes really seen?"

-- Leslie Duncan



Love is the opening door.
And each time he loves, it's as if
another door inside him opens.
Like a flower, unfurling. Inside out, and outside in,
and the inside is the outside is the inside.
He manifests, enacts, makes real
what he already knew:
That blue skin is beautiful, that scales are a hoot,
if you know which way to rub them,
that feathers tickle, but are worth it,
that every form of life and slither and limb
is another way to center oneself inside the shining World,
and Jack wants to know every one.
And he will.

Love is what we came here for,
though he's longer at finding out,
layer by layer, lick by lick and scent by scent,
an even more wonderful entry.
He's known what it is to lose -- his brother, his planet,
his memories, even his name.
And separately, he's known love.
The kind that breezes in on the rising
of the morning suns, and bids farewell
with the setting of so many moons.
It's not until he feels them,
hurling as deeply and dazedly
as into any time vortex,
as one, that he begins to understand.

No one could offer you more,
but the Doctor is afraid. Well and about time.
So to speak. So to layeredly, ah,
and it all comes round and round,
all at the same... "I can feel the planet whirling
and turning and hurtling through..", he says,
and the little blonde woman takes his hand, gripping tight.
Though who is anchor, and who is sail, he will not say,
not even to himself. Not even to the wind.
He has severed it all -- his people,
his enemy, his love.
What greater sacrifice?
(And the Universe goes on.)

Do you know what I mean?
Do you understand, now, why Jack, dear complicated Jack,
dear sweet, dizzy, flamboyant, suffering, WRONG Jack
is so very hard for him to endure.
When he's pushing as hard as he can against all that KNOWING.
When love and pain are one, how can anyone withstand either?

Have your eyes really seen?
Have you see the way that
grace never falters. The way Jack finds him,
in the end, which is not the end, or even the middle,
but just that one, single, beautiful connection,
that one moment of yes, love, and just this once,
everybody lives, and grants him that, a balm of healing
for his wintered grief.
That it's out of sequence
is beside the point. The Doctor, after all,
is only in the least salient sense, linear.
"My old friend," Jack gets to say at last,
"I knew you'd come."
And the people are saved, and so (though the punchline
won't land for another span of mercy's hand
in the ocean of time that is the Doctor's mind),
is he.

I love how many scenes are filmed through windows and glass walls... alternately blurred and clear, obscuring and revealing. All the layers of transparency....

Woke early today to take Sundara to the airport -- we watched snow fall from the kitchen window, dusting the ground and the trees. By the time I woke up again, hours later, the snow was gone. Later again, on my way to Trader Joe's to stock up on kosher organic chicken, there was first a very soft hail (which Gryphonrhi informs me is called gropple -- it was exactly the texture of crumbling styrofoam), and then, a few blocks on down the road, real hail and icy rain. I drove sloooooowly.

An old favorite, recalled yesterday in a conversation with a new friend about the way her cat regards snow:


The Snow Man

WALLACE STEVENS

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

this is my listing:

User name: devohoneybee (LJ and DW)
email: devohoneybee@yahoo.com

Give me a fandom, prompt, pairing, and/or theme, and I'll write a poem for you. Gen, slash, kink, spiritual, I'm pretty much open.

Fandoms I'm familiar with: Highlander, White Collar, Forever Knight, Buffy, Farscape, the Bible and other old stories, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Torchwood, BSG. I'll consider others, if I've at least seen/read them.

Starting bid: $18

Go here to bid: http://community.livejournal.com/help_haiti/1823.html?page=12#comments and scroll to find "offering poetry" under devohoneybee.

Hey guys,

I am sponsoring a FANTASTIC workshop in Albuquerque in March for a spiritual healer guy named Ger Lyons. Ger leads workshops using a trans-denominational process of invoking divine healing energy that comes through each participant in the workshop for everyone there. Ger's workshops are vivid, intense, fun, wild, personal, and profound. His work touches on healing at every level, and includes healing trans-generational and ancestral issues.

My own experience of being in one of Ger's workshops is that of the weight of old patterns and clouds of stuck energies moving off of me, leaving me feeling lighter and freer to be who I was meant to be. The dates are March 25th (introductory evening), March 26th (evening), and all day March 27th and 28th. For more info, including cost, check out www.gerlyons.net, go to Events, and scroll down for Albuquerque/March. Or ask me questions!

New Mexico is gorgeous. It would be a nice way to come visit. :)

compare and contrast:

BSG: The Plan

The fall of Lucifer (especially in the depiction in the movie "The Prophecy" (talking monkeys!)

Richard Rubenstein's book "After Auschwitz", vis. his comparison of Jewish/Christian relations from the Middle Ages on as a sibling rivalry for the attentions of the Father.

more later when I have time!

That soup recipe I posted? I was lamenting to my mother that I had not been able to find parsley root. Two days later I got a box in the mail -- filled with it. I cannot tell you how happy this made me. That evening, I found her on chat (we mostly communicate that way as Mom is deaf and chat is a lot easier than going through a relay operator). I thanked her and told her how happy I was when I opened that box and saw all that parsley root. She said, "I sent the happy with it." *heart*

Also, I made my first poetry sale. A poem I wrote will appear in a book by Karen Lord entitled The Best of All Possible Worlds, which won the Frank Collymore literary prize in Barbados last night. Wheeee! for Karen, and for getting paid for a poem I wrote. This is a good day.

(And now I want an icon with a parsley root that says "I sent the happy with it.")

Excellent article on how ideas of "mental illness" are far more culturally determined than the arbiters of such things generally acknowledge, and highlighting the unfortunate global influence of American/Western ideas on the rest of the world's evolving health practices. My comment on it is to wonder why there is such a rigid "either/or" in thinking about "mental health" problems and the contribution of BOTH brain/physiology factors AND culture/belief systems/emotions. It seems as if a truly holistic, synergistic understanding of such things is very hard to capture -- that people like their clear, easy causalities, falsely believing it gives them some sort of control.

MAGAZINE | January 10, 2010
The Americanization of Mental Illness
By ETHAN WATTERS
In recent years, American ideas about psychiatric disorders have spread around the globe. Is that really good for the world's mental health?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?emc=eta1


If you aren't already registered with the NY Times, you will have to do so to read this article. It's free of charge and won't lead to spam.

This is a small, quiet movie I saw last night on cable. About a year old, I think. Features a tired-out professor who visits his New York apartment (he lives mostly in Connecticut) and finds inadvertent squatters there (they had been scammed into thinking it was a legitimate rental). The man is Syrian and the woman is from Senegal, and they all begin to get to know each other. Stuff happens, and then some other stuff happens. There are no car chases, no gun shots. The white man does not save the "natives." This is a very quiet, touching, human story, very un-Hollywood. Much recommended. The professor is played by the same actor who was the father in Six Feet Under.