Loving Jazz
When I was 9, I would sneak out of the house on South 6the Street near Snyder, when my Mother was asleep and walk into the Center City. One night I stood in the doorway of the Jazz club called the ‘Log Cabin’ on South Street at Broad in Philadelphia to listen to John Coltrane. This club was an important stop for the great musicians on their national or international tours. I was just to young and small to be allowed in the club.
He was my heart sound. He was the sound that the tip of the creative arrow makes in the the sleeping mass. John Coltrane was coding time and place. The real artist is of his time and place as a true mirror of the goings on. He expressed the repressed anger of the 1950’s .
I listened to My Favorite Things album every day I came home from junior high school.
I have long been interested in the intersection of the history of truth and how with a ‘collection of options’, people in general, and forward thinking individuals would create our human future. What to do with people who speak out?How to dig into the data stream in real time?
I love John Coltrane, his passion and fire, his musical comments, ‘speak out’ loudly about the anger of racism, touched me as a child and on into my teen years. This music and this man who listened to his fellow beings with his heart served to create my personality and core values that ‘I am my brothers keeper’. His time with Sun Ra, who played free concerts with his entire space cadet orkestra thrilled me. Many Jazz creators taught me to listen to life, listen without the barrier of ideology and ego. I guess in current parlance would be called Mindfulness. Jazz really formed my mind. Dave Brubeck too.
True Stability
Yes, there is a pointer of thought. Who among us spends more than an occasional moment or gives much thought to just where Thoughts come from? Where do we each place the pointer of our thinking mechanism? Finding this takes real mental effort and emotional control. The difficulty is finding the tip of a thought. Where in your brain and consciousness do thoughts start? Some writers and thinkers have labeled that point a space in time. I once heard a man say that it is a GAP where choice functions. He used the word GAP to give some idea of thinking as a stream of action that has a muscular structure and can be exercised to be in charge of the development of strength and stability of Mind. The vagaries of life happen though I choose the direction to tell my ‘thought’ where and how to travel.
It is like the difference of a cozy relationship and a marriage. How do people make the choice to do more than just visit with one another as humans who are dating and risk being together in cohabitation both physically and financially? The choice might be an emotional space we have all experienced at one level or another. Emotions are easier to understand than thinking.
When I drive, I am calm. It took many years of working on the space between the originating thought and a response either physical as accelerating or breaking or the emotional response which rises my blood pressure or an expression such as honking .
True stability is poise in the GAP. It is an ease with the short view of what is good right here and now in this moment in this lifetime and the long view of how this moment will attract and construct the future of individuals, Nations, and our very planet in the family of stars.
Being moderate and trying to live simply certainly gives me a large screen to view the display of my actions and reactions. I am a beginner.
Sound Waves In Stones
Nothing you ever say is lost. Every word, ( you say out loud), continues to move across the vast stretches of time and space. Some sounds are stored in the surrounding solid matter before some of the sonic vibration bounces and continues out through the star dust. My daughter read the following pages and asked me, ‘What is your point?’ So I answer, ‘sound is the most powerful force in the nature system ‘. It is the waves that move matter. The Boom might come after our sight of lightening in the sky, but the lightening is a flash of magnetism, attracting particles and the sound continues to move through all molecules.
SILENCE is to be considered more carefully.
‘Be ready to let go of the life you planned to make a place for the life that is here: The life that is coming’. ~ Joseph Campbell
His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.”
Stones do not forget what occurred in the stone walled rooms. Do you ever take a good long look at your walls?
Sound waves continue on out to the edge of the universe. Sound keeps going in a undulating wave and never stops. A drum produces sound via a vibrating membrane.
Boom Boom BOOM
All the concerts ever held in this room sing out from all the walls in all the rooms in all the prized castles in the city, the rural towns, and all the countries around our globe. The walls absorb sound. The stones build buildings of power.
Wondrous beauty is preserved in the molecular construction of the stone, stacked one upon another, reaching to high ceiling cell spaces. Our rooms are built for living life to the fullest and catching and holding every moment of our vibrant life. I listen to every instant of my life. I hear, that all life is brimming with sound.
Lovingly Washing The Same Plate For The Rest Of My Life
I am lovingly washing the same cup, saucer, plate, and bowl, for the rest of my life!
I am a one of a kind life. A one of a kind stone, and every stone is unique. Just as each person is a one of a kind. Think yourself and about each of us a a stone which is used to build a one of a kind room. Each construction comes down to the small one of a kind cell in our billion celled human body as this important, one of a kind individual. Stone walls are for boundaries walling a separate and safe space from the outside forces of man and nature. Unlike concrete, which has no long-term connection to the core of the earth, stone holds in its layers all our stories. Stone time, taken from our molten beginning, reaches back into our global origin, it records our structural creation compounded from dust. Concrete has none of the made by Mother Nature molecular structure that retains sounds.
Sound is ‘energy in action’. Every sound flows as undulating sign wave which does not stop waving. Sound is an unending movement in air that is forever carrying our songs and sighs of happiness and sadness out to the edges of the finite edges of space. Does space have an edge?
Sound is Energy.
The perception of sound in any organism is limited to a certain range of frequencies. For humans, hearing is normally limited to frequencies between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz (20 kHz)
Just like in science class where I learned that energy is the capacity to do work, I came to understand that sound moves mountains too. Sound is also the capacity to play. Sound is a property of any system, which diminishes when the potency moves. Doppler begins with vigor to diminish as vapor on the wind. Sound could collect in an effort of laziness often labeled as a song stuck in my head. It is funny to listen as the sound system does ‘work’.
Work and Play are both an action. One Mind Set System on another system. How do you choose to label your everyday activities? Work and Play are movement. Both are consumers of energy. The words I choose are my way of communicating a level of gravity about each action. Time sure flies when you are having fun!
The diminution of this quality of vigorous sound in time calls to my mind the communication between the Space Station and NASA.
Hello Huston, One Small Step For Mankind…. !
Endeavour Over The Golden Gate Bridge 21 September 2012
What ‘work’ builds our bodies, what play does the same building? Both play and work builds our minds, bodies, our lives, and our structures. Joy is the potential amount of usefulness we, each of us use in the creation of everything we think say and do and produce. Songs and stories do the heavy lifting in life. How else are we to be useful, both for our self and the many other selves?
Remembering that we were sitting still in a stone building, we constructed in our imagination, hearing the resonance bouncing off the walls of our brain, the history recorded in our breathing in and out.
In this present moment, where we are now, sitting or standing, we are able to be actively remember that we can breath as we play and work. We flow along with the Earth in its pushed spin around the sun. Storms of particles bombard every material thing from the cyclic explosions on our system Sun. Our Earth is a small dot in a small solar system in the far left arm of our spiraling galaxy. We are stardust! Shimmering reflections of refracted light held together by some habit pattern. We are the flow of electrical signals in a consensual harmony. This pattern can motivate your thoughts into material forms that become the self-fulfilling prophesy. Don’t Worry, Be Happy!
The ability to act while watching the effect on both things and people is a force of leadership. When we marvel at our unlimited natural source of usable mental, emotional, and physical potential then we have a visual reference of the results of your actions. We can see that our ‘grace in action’ blossoms from the seeds emanating from a ‘self’ we plant with every thought and step.
Watch the tension and exertion of your thought, as you generate and direct a desire. It is a desire that moves us through life. A desire for comfort, or a fear of discomfort, or an anger with whatever that takes the ease and creates ‘dis-ease’. Be an observer of yourself in your own life. Breathe with your own rhythm and listen to your sound. Hear your thoughts as you move. Move into a language made up of words you use to describe the place where you are and the place you are moving toward. The truth about life is that even if you are sitting still you are always moving.
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard {Physics of sound , Spherical compression waves The mechanical vibrations that can be interpreted as sound are able to travel through all forms of matter: gases, liquids, solids, and plasmas. The matter that supports the sound is called the medium. Sound cannot travel through a vacuum. Longitudinal and transverse waves Sound is transmitted through gases, plasma, and liquids as longitudinal waves, also called compression waves. Through solids, however, it can be transmitted as both longitudinal waves and transverse waves. Longitudinal sound waves are waves of alternating pressure deviations from the equilibrium pressure, causing local regions of compression and rarefaction, while transverse waves (in solids) are waves of alternating shear stress at right angle to the direction of propagation.
Matter in the medium is periodically displaced by a sound wave, and thus oscillates. The energy carried by the sound wave converts back and forth between the potential energy of the extra compression (in case of longitudinal waves) or lateral displacement strain (in case of transverse waves) of the matter and the kinetic energy of the oscillations of the medium. Sound wave properties and characteristics: Sinusoidal waves of various frequencies; the bottom waves have higher frequencies than those above. The horizontal axis represents time. Sound waves are often simplified to a description in terms of sinusoidal plane waves, which are characterized by generic properties Frequency, or its inverse.}
A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, a perfect man and a perfect woman met. After a perfect courtship they had a perfect wedding. Their life together was, of course, perfect. One snowy, stormy Christmas Eve, this perfect couple was driving their perfect car along a winding road when they noticed someone up ahead in distress. Being the perfect couple, they stopped to help. There stood Santa Claus with a huge bundle of toys.
Father Christmas Santa Claus
Not wanting to disappoint children on the eve of Christmas, the perfect couple loaded Santa and his toys into their car. Soon they were driving along delivering toys. Unfortunately, driving conditions deteriorated and the perfect couple and Santa were in a terrible accident. Only one of the three survived. Who was the survivor?
Archangel Surviving Accidents
*woman
The perfect woman survived. She’s the only one who really existed in the first place. Everyone knows there is no Santa Claus and there is no such thing as a perfect man. So, if there is no perfect man and no Santa Claus, the perfect woman must have been driving. This explains why there was an accident!
Parkway Program
I remember Len! He is a tall thin black man who always had a wise comment and a great uplifting smile. He was in my circle of friends. There were many smiling faces around the Parkway Program High School.
It was an experiment in education as a series of many school centers without a building. A High School without a High School Building! How could that function?
The Teachers were hired because of their creativity and abilities to be great teachers and flow into a program where they each had to find space in the City Of Philadelphia where they could host their classes for the entire semester of year. I was invited to teach by one of the hired Principle’s, who introduced me to, and to be interviewed by John Bremer. Dr Bremer came up with the concept of using the city as a classroom.
Here I want to include the Wikipedia Page:
John Bremer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
John Bremer is an internationally-known educator and Socratic philosopher who has been professionally involved with education and teaching for more than half a century. Now in his elder years, in 2008 he retired as a senior scholar teaching at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was Professor of Humanities and Director of the College’s Humanities and Freedom Institute. Professor Bremer founded Cambridge College in 1971 when it was then known as the “Institute of Open Education” at Newton College of the Sacred Heart. He now lives full time in Vermont where he continues his research and writing.
John Bremer was born in England, living in London during The Blitz, and served in the Royal Air Force during World War II building airfields in England. He holds advanced degrees from the Pembroke College, Cambridge, England, the University of Leicester and St. John’s College, U.S.. Professor Bremer came to the USA in 1951 on a Fulbright Fellowship.
In the 1960s Professor Bremer gained international recognition for creating the Parkway Program, in Philadelphia, the first School Without Walls as documented in a book by the same name. The school was featured in Time Magazine in its March 23, 1970 edition.[1]
He was Killam Senior Fellow at Dalhousie University in Halifax and later Commissioner of Education for British Columbia, Canada in 1973.
In 1975, when a professor of Education at Western Washington University he founded the Institute of Socratic Study where Professor Bremer was its director until he moved to Australia in 1980 to found the Education Supplement for The Australian newspaper.
I sat with Dr Bremer and felt the clear insightful gaze as he questioned me as to what I would bring to The Program. I told him that I had an idea for a class that taught Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, that used Art Projects instead of written papers as assigned homework. I called the class: Creative Conceptual Conjecture. I would offer it to all of the High Schools for the junior and senior grades.
We would read The Joseph Campbell book on Myths, The Act Of Creation: Arthur Koestler. (It is a study of the process of discovery, invention, imagination, and creativity in humor, science, and the arts. It laid out Koestler’s attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of Human Creativity). There was a book on color theory and human emotions that came with a set of odd color cards. Dr Bremer liked my idea and I was sent on to get a teachers copy of three of the books I wanted accompanied by the Principle of the Alpha High School.
There was Alpha, the first school of the lottery selection sites. The City Of Philadelphia High Schools were given lottery applications and the students were chosen by chance draw like a big bingo game.
Beta and Delta Schools followed. Each of the schools had a brick and mortar site which functioned as a homeroom. The sort of site where teachers had a cubbyhole for mail, where they had meetings and where the students could mill around and do some bumping into one another as they collect themselves and collect themselves and one another. It was a place where young adults could meet people who might not be taking the same classes yet were part of the new school system.
Does anyone of the alum’s remember who they were then and appreciate the magic? Do people leave their high school teen times, and places, like smoke and dissipate? I do not believe that the exposure to Parkway evaporates as people mature. If anything the classroom with out walls builds a ‘gee wiz’ attitude to future experiences thorough out an entire life.
Is giving up and forgetting as much of the past a usual practice, is it a life diminishing to support minimal functioning as sanity saving grace? Or is all the convenience of grace and imagination, in a expansive education, which when I am in the need of grace, helps me to stand when all things want me to lie down. Creative thinking is a boat that always gets each of us to the other side of any problem.
Though my educational roots grew elsewhere, I blossomed in a group that included Richard C. We rented a stone mansion along the Wissahickon Creek. I was teaching at the Parkway Program and at the High School for Girls, so I could get the lease. We called the commune Bum Fuck Egypt that morphed in to the Island of The Red Hood. The house had five bedrooms. I had the master bedroom with the two big windows facing the street. Richard lived in another room with M.H. in our wonderful commune, which we gave the Lenny Bruce banner bonhomie, Bum Fuck Egypt. It was this same Richard is who brought me to the Island of the Red Hood in Hinton West Virginia; Len might have been part of that group. Poets, patricians, politicos, true and wannabee artists, writers, and antique dealers called Island of the Red Hood home. They all were involved in being in an out of the way part of the world where drugs and dalliances might flourish in privacy. Those were the days at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
I taught painting, English and a class called Creative Conceptual Conjecture… the painting class was in the original Tower Theater Rock and Roll cavern that sat a thousand people. This is where I saw the Who. I was sitting on the second row of wooden backless benches. English class met in an office meeting room on the second floor of a fancy stationary, pen and paper store on either Chestnut or Walnut Street and ‘Creative Conceptual Conjecture’ in my own painting studio. My first studio on the third or first floor walk up on 40 hundred block of Spruce St and then in a bigger place on 42nd St and Samson. Rob took a picture from one of the first days of class.
Hawking’s Gravity
How often does Kindness and Intelligence bind harmoniously in one well known person? I had an opportunity to stand next to Dr Stephan Hawking and talk directly to him personally while looking right into his eyes. Both eyes were focused and expressive. In fact I got a whole conversation and wonderful connected sense of grace from our extended glances.
Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Kip Thorne will be presenting a program on Black Holes on Tuesday June 19, 2012 at 8pm at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA.
What I so much wanted to tell him was my unpretentious story about reading a book he authored. I was simply talking to this man who I had admired for most of his life. I told him that some 21 or 22 years ago when his thick volume came out I was living in Princeton N.J. I said that I went into the Young Adult section of the Library and took out the thin young adult version and read it in entirety. That version was in larger print and did not have any of the equations!
It happened that I was standing next to him that perfectly lovely June afternoon. It was at that point that he looked into my eyes and I felt a wave of gratitude coming from him. It was a glance of such tenderness and grace full of real understanding and an appreciation of my honesty, as I was completely unpretentious about reading the children’s copy! My telling the unabashed truth gave me a life long gift of the deep connection with respect for his work though the nuts and bolts are over my head.
The event at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA. Highlighted the extraordinary new proofs of the gravitational spin both in black holes and the collision of two black holes. There in an easy to comprehend power point presentation was the first glimmer of gravitation force. It is more than any other explanation a position for the gravity puzzle
Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Kip Thorne will be presenting a program on Black Holes on Tuesday June 19 at 8pm at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA.
It Must Be True
Is Depression on the rise? It ought to be, if we face the kind of self-world we have created unto ourselves without seeing the way out of it.
Yes, if we actually face the full extent of the horror of this reality we ought to be VERY depressed. It would be a sentient, sensible and reasonable response.
I am wondering about the ones who are not ‘depressed’ by it !!! With what excuses they pursue their karma dodging.
So, feeling depressed is a very good starting point, a honest, genuine one. Then we, you and I, need to realize that our depression won’t get us anywhere. It is helplessly reactive. Rather, we need to realize how we are completely account-able in Cosmic Tension for our ‘self-world’, and the creative potential that comes with this realization. It is time to say It Must Be True. It is time to get cracked and let some of the horrible slime slither out of cracked and exploded places in our skin. It is time to let in the light of life and wake up to who we have become to one another.
Then we need to discover and master the most potent human resource there is, that:
Thinking frames what ‘IS’ each one of us as a self-world. This means, we can also wipe the slate clean intelligently and within reason in order to beget the self-world that manifests the Highest Good of all humanity together as one. We can stop being mean to each other. We can stop hurting each other with harsh hurting words. We can start to care.
I have been fighting cancer for almost two years and in that time the people in my family circle, the ones I would expect to be caring and to care for me have not. I believe is it a societal dysfunction. I believe that all around the United States there are people suffering who do not have a loving arm around their shoulders to give strength and comfort. I send out this missive in the hopes that some people will extend a little effort toward the people in your world.
Suck It Up
Don’t cry for me, suck it up, don’t cry for me! Sadness will not attack my soul, I do not want you to cry for me…. Surrender your soul to me and do it with out fear, surrender your heart and soul to me with gladness and with all the love in your heart.
I had the great pleasure of watching the performance by Gloria Estefan, Jose Feliciano, and Sheila E. for the The President Obama family and friends. In the conversation by the performer before the music, she said that No Llores meant Just Suck It Up and Move On , in the local vernacular. It seems like a good start in understanding Be Here Now salsa style.
Gloria opened the “In Performance at the White House: Fiesta Latina 2009” with “No Llores”. Also, at the end, Estefan together with Jennifer Lopez, Thalía, Marc Anthony, José Feliciano, performed a rendition of her Spanish-language classic, “Mi Tierra“. With the White House as a background stage set the salsa rang out. Like any of the many Latino, Latina party complete with live music, out on the grass lawn, sometimes in a tent, this performance was monumental.
| No Llores | Don’t Cry | |
|---|---|---|
| No llores, no llores, no llores, no llores x 4
Si vas a entregar el alma Deja de llorar, deja de llorar, deja de llorar Si un día no me quisieras ¡Ay! no llores por mí mi amor El día que yo me muera ¡Ay! no llores, no llores por mí No llores, no llores, no llores por mí, por mí Si no disfrutas de la vida nunca podrás ser feliz. ¡Ay! no llores, no llores, no llores más |
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry x 4
If you are going to surrender your soul Stop crying, stop crying, stop crying If one day you should not love me Oh! don’t cry for me my love The day that I die Oh! don’t cry, don’t cry for me Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry for me, for me If you do not enjoy life you will never be able to be happy. Oh! don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry any more |
Understand Enjoyment: The show reminded me of all the suffering in the world and how just a little of unconditional love and a real partner to share the trip and travel and wonder of living together in a life of service to the greater good for Peace for all persons and beings. She is a woman after my own heart. Her Integrity and morals mirror my belief that there is a man in this world and it is worth the patience until he finds you. Romance is of such value that it is important to know what you want and wait for the Man who knows what you have to offer him at the end of the day. It is a tough world and Home must be a place to be cared for and to return the caring.
I have been alone inside myself for far too long and I am ready for that Moment…
Gloria became romantically involved with the Miami Sound Machine’s band leader, Emilio Estefan, in 1976. As she later revealed, “he was my first and only boyfriend.” She and Emilio married on September 1, 1978. They have a son, Nayib, and a daughter, Emily Marie. The family lives in the Miami Beach, Florida.
Rewiring the System 