Turnover

"People think that when they get to heaven they will turn over a new leaf," Thoreeau said. As if, once we’re dead, we’ll have the energy to retrace all our steps backwards, like a spiritual Ginger Rogers—in our gown and gold slippers. I grow tired trying to retrace an hour’s steps when I lose something. I usually decide that what’s lost is not worth the time to search.
The church down the street decided to hold a rummage sale and donations filled their entire community room. They sent out a plea for help.
We tried to sort through the drifts of cast-off clothing.
On the news, an old woman was discovered after weeks trapped in her house by her clutter with her husband’s corpse. The firemen dug for hours in protective masks to reach her.
In the debris scattered outside lay a large wooden spoon, the kind sold to tourists on tropical islands.
It reminded me of a Jewish story. A man visited hell, and the people there complained they were tortured by hunger. Banquets of food lay spread out, and long spoons.
“You see how they make us suffer, with these spoons that are too long for us to hold to our own mouths,” the damned wailed.
Then the man went to heaven, and found the same banquet spread. People there laughed and fed each other with the same great spoons.
This morning, instead of rolling feet first out of bed, I slid my head down the edge of the bed and looked upside-down through the window. The tips of the pines bowed with the wind that brought gold-rose clouds swirling. Is that how God sees the world, mostly heaven? For us, our interior life so overwhelms, that we hardly notice sky—is heaven as distracting to God? We think we would be happier if we knew that God paid more attention to us. But maybe the only way to true happiness is to be more like God, and see as he sees.

Money

Ever notice how the faces on coins never look you in the eye? Hades, god of death, is the god of wealth, as well. The only faces that look straight out of coins aren’t human: animals and mythic figures like Victory and Justice. The animals are all conservative in their use of energy, predatory and long-lived: snakes, owls and eagles. No mice or ants need apply, despite their industry.
One tribe had money so large it became symbolic: even when one huge stone sunk in deep water and couldn’t be retrieved, the people still granted its owner the full value.
American money is so ugly that it’s hard to desire it for itself. One wants to exchange it as quickly as possible. With its pale cast, our money reminds me of ice, precarious, able to survive only in the cold, melts through one’s hand.
The gambler struggles with the unreality of money, its lack of satisfaction. How fitting that one of the main Vegas institutions is called “The Mirage.”
Money changes nothing but itself.
Songs have never been designated as money, nor mouths, nor things that have a will of their own, or a fate that may cause them to die unexpectedly.
With money as with words, more doesn’t equal better.
Money can’t hold wisdom, nor can it buy any.

A Brief History of Fools

There were natural or dimwitted fools and artificial ones. Natural fools were more valuable and were sold at monster auctions; the more foolish they were, the more they cost.
Fool was one of the few positions open to women in Medieval times. However, it seems that more men had a gift for it.
Master Henry was King Henry III’s fool; he was also poet laureate.
Maître Jehain was the fool of King John II of France; when the king was imprisoned, the fool went with him.
In 1461, the kings of Bohemia and Hungary grew tired of war and sent their fools to fight each other, agreeing to abide by the results; the Hungarian fool won.

Medical Alert

MEDICAL ALERT from Francine Prozac
Imagine a disease that afflicts nearly every single person on earth, with the possible exception of the hermit—
And absolutely no one is working on a cure!
Shocking?
Well, it’s sad but true.

Lovesickness strikes millions each year, especially this time of year. No one knows how it happens. Some say it’s the close quarters of dry, poorly ventilated rooms.

NO ONE IS IMMUNE!
Rich and poor, young and old, men and women—the malady can befall all. That hermit is probably hiding in the cave because he’s a severe case.
Look around, you’ll see the tell-tale symptoms of the afflicted: the twitching fingers of someone itching to check for messages that never come fast enough to assuage the pain, zombie women popping Good ‘n Plentys like self-prescribing addicts under cover of the dark movie theater, and hapless bodies scattered across the park lawn like victims of some secret weapon that blows out the brain but leaves the body behind.

FACT: An 89 year-old billionaire from Texas came down with the love sickness after a night in a pole-dancing bar, and in fourteen months, he was dead.

FACT: You might be the next victim.
(Don’t laugh—that’s one way the disease is thought to be passed from person to person.)

Many try home remedies: cold showers, garlic, writing poems. Guess what? They don’t help much.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Help support my campaign to find a cure. Cash, checks and chocolates are welcome. Every little bit of chocolate helps.

A Child's Christmas

At a Christmas service, a young child stood clueless in the crowded pew, wondering what was going on. She couldn’t see past the coats on all sides. The elder sister explained it all for her:
"Christmas was the day God died in a stable manger."
What a shining example of reasoning things out for oneself, from parental warnings about the dangers of really filthy places.
But in a way, the girl is right: the old idea of a lone, distant God died in the incarnation, and in becoming flesh, God also accepted his eventual death. Incarnation and Passion are inextricable, as Bill Tully says. And each event requires us to give up something. The nativity requires us to give up our aloofness, the old faith that God doesn't need us—from the moment he was born, he was in grave danger.
At Easter, the girl must have taught her sister about how God was born out of an egg. Because at Easter the resurrection shatters the hardened, hollow world. If the graves were broken open and the saints walked, we have to give up our belief that anything spiritual is ever laid to rest.

Bottoms Up

The earth weighs six sextillion tons, yet it does not plummet to the bottom of the universe.
Why?
Because the universe has no bottom.
We create riddles by starting with the answer, but the world creates riddles first, with no answer in sight.
Dostoevsky writes in Brothers Karamazov, “Absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

Don't Look Now

This is a computer image with the black holes that riddle the universe highlighted.

At the center of most galaxies lie black holes. While the universe is expanding and forming new things, the black hole is compressing and making things one again, as they were at the Big Bang. 

Black holes are like little round rear view mirrors, so while we’re flying down the highway to nowhere, we can see where we’ve come from, oblivion, and whether it’s catching up to us.