"This is simply another failure of imagination: nature is not only to be found 'out there'; it is also 'in here,' in the apple and the potato, in the garden and in the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower. My is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we'll ahve traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity."

Reading Michael Pollan makes my fingers itch for pen and keyboard. Now, with keys kissing fingertips, I'm a bit paralyzed. I'll let that be for now. More reading, more learning, to see what new itches I can conjure.

The new york times top right front page headline today reads "Bush Opens lead Despiote Unease Voiced in Survey." However vague we might take the word "opens" to be, all should note the fine print, a story which is buried in page A10: "Varying Polls Reflect Volaltility, Experts Say." Of course, the New York Times should be prominently reporting the results of its OWN poll, the original polling deserves some prominence. But is this responsible journalism? To run an article that certainly will influence the tone for the race for the NYT's readers, claiming a strong lead that it then questions as "volatile" in a page-A10 article, explaining how polls differing in just a few days in their timespan have recorded results ranging from a strong Bush lead to absolutely no Bush lead? NYT readers should not have to dig that hard for the full pictur

AIDS, the master illuminator of systems of oppression and social injustice.

no sunshine when she's gone

The sun has barely broke the clouds since I've returned, and the house is deadquiet during the day. Sharp transition from the piercing sunshine of Jerusalem, so reliable that it was my only alarm clock for the entire summer. And from the constant echoings of the fivesome shuls and hundreds of little stacked and tumbling homes surrounding my apartment on the Streets of the Stairway and the Saphire stone. I went to the supermarket yesterday with my mother, looked sadly at the prepackaged bags of nuts and the wilting vegetables and yearned for the screaming and gyrating mad chorus of machaneh yehuda, for the nut venders surrounded by peoples and piles, wielding their scoops like trained jugglers and taking three orders at one; for the exploding honey of figs hanging pregnantly from roadside trees, and the rare nectar of fresh picked and just-squeeze shabbat grapejuice.
I long for so many people and places at once, and am no less in the midst of intense emotional vertigo and total confusion about my life, my plans, my relationships. And yet I am incessantly and incurably happy. I wander around my house with this silly smile plastered across my face. I remember Yishayahu:
Lo yehiye hashemesh leor yomam
olenoga
Hayareach lo yair lach
Vehaya lach hashem leor olam
Veshalmu yeme avlech.