Pick-up Day

Today's Saturday, and the book club comes Monday night.  Today is pick-up day around the living room, here, the day when I'll be going around with a big cardboard box, trying to get this room into a Martha Stewart state of blandness. It is such a small room; it really should never be dominated by the welter of papers, books, music, souvenir rocks,  pine cones, family photographs and candlesticks that are usually lying around in it.

So, I'll get everything out of it and it will look so neat!! I 'll take a photograph of it and think: wow, how nice. Wouldn't it be great if it could look like this all the time, in the Temple Tradition? My family would be proud of me. Then on Tuesday morning, I'll go back to living in it.

I can pick up a few things on the blog too. Yesterday's cold brought another flurry of dire reports from my sisters.  Things are really dead over there in South Texas. And when a lot of plants die there, that's a lot of botany that is going to wilt and rot over the next few weeks. It is going to smell terrible, because shortly the weather will be hot again.   It's sad.  When I was a kid, there were a lot of citrus growers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. If it was going to get cold, they would put out smudge pots to save the orange and grapefruit and lemon trees.  My mother or grandfather might go out with an old blanket or carton to protect a special plant or tree.  But cold like this was not something that happened then. This is huge, a massive blight that will leave its effects behind it for years.

Another thing. I found a book in my bookshelf yesterday entitled, A Wholly Different  Way of Living.  It is a transcription of some dialogs between Professor Alan W. Anderson and J. Krishnamurti. Professor Alan W. Anderson is the man I told you about some days ago when I was writing about the I Ching.  I had his first initials wrong, as I knew at the time (but you have to just go along on a blog).   Anyway, the important point, besides getting the name right, is my remembrance of seeing those very dialogs on KPBS TV in San Diego.  I heard them shortly after my transformative experience with Jungian therapy here in San Diego, and it was a shock to me then  that I heard them and understood them.  Oh, I didn't and still don't get the depths that those men could plumb in their discourse, but I could follow along quite easily. I knew what they were talking about. It was like picking up a book in a foreign language that you suddenly realized you could read and comprehend. So, we can grow.  I have put A Wholly Different Way of Living out where I can put my hands on it when the book club has gone and I can read at it from time to time.

Another thing. I went to the Mission Hills Library Book Club on Thursday morning. They had read Swann's Way by Marcel Proust.  It has been many a long year since I read at Swann's Way. It is indeed a remarkable book.  Most of the readers seemed to be impressed by the quality and quantity of his observation. Call it presence.  Call it Mindfulness.  Call it a wholly different way of living. Only it isn't wholly different. He just happened to have the time, with that asthma and all, and not having to go out and teach school every day, come what may, to lie back and recall, and let it all happen through him and his writing hand.

But now I have to pick up the living room and sort out the silver forks and spoons and worry about the timing for the Cherry Berries on a Cloud. The book club will be disappointed not to have whipped cream on the side, but there is whipped cream in the dessert.  I have to do a little actual cleaning, for a change, creeping along in my husband's wake as he's already done the most, as usual. It has to be neat, and it has to be a Good Thing.  Ah, Martha, Martha!! Which Martha can I mean, you ask ?   Just think, if Martha Stewart's mama had named her Mary Stewart, she mght have been the one having the  dialog with Krishnamurti!
YAZZYBEL