Workin' for the Man Sucks

He came upon a pond and as he swam there it became colder and colder. A flock of creatures flew overhead, the most beautiful he had ever seen. They cried down to him, and hearing their sounds made his heart leap and break at the same time. He cried back in a sound he had never before made. He had never seen creatures more beautiful, and he had never felt more bereft.

The Ugly Duckling

Listened to a podcast last night about a bloke and his wife and his four kids who launched out into an artistic career, because he felt God telling him to depend on him, with everyone around him telling him he was being "irresponsible" and quoting verses at him about "if you will not work you will not eat" and he felt like a loony but felt like God was telling him to. And he hasn't gone without a meal ever, even though the electricity has been cut off from time to time, and he still feels like a loony but he feels free and like he is doing what God is telling him to do.

Sometimes I wonder if God is telling me or suggesting things to me and I'm not listening. Or not believing because it sounds too good. I'm inclined to think, "Why me?" Why should I have a satisfying job being paid to write when heaps of people have shitty jobs bored out of their skulls? I don't want to buy into that Gen X thing we were brought upon that all of us are meant to have wonderful amazing jobs. But then on the other hand, why not? Hope deferred makes the heart sick and I've been working shit jobs for several decades. Writing and being published is right there in front of my eyes on the newstands but they might as well be on Jupiter if I don't believe it's possible. And I don't really. But I do. But then I don't. Sometimes I think the greatest yearnings I have for freedom, to run out the door and fly into the wind, to go and work in Alice Springs, to write and keep writing, are the most responsible followings after God I could do if I had the courage. Other times I don't know if I am hearing anything at all, or if I am it's just my own ego. Sometimes i think if I could just hear him tell me in that crystal clear/hardly heard way that I so love and hate, along with a few wet fleeces on the ground, I would be off like a rocket, going wherever or doing whatever. Other times my knees knock together at the thought.

I am at work feeling unwell. Feeling inspired by what I heard last night. Wondering and wandering. Working for the man.

Too Much Is Never Enough

You know, I love the Americans who read here. But I am sick of hearing about your bloody country. This is a rant about certain things that are infuriating me, so if you are sensitive in this area, probably best to stop reading now, okay? If you wonder who the hell am I to have an opinion, if you find it difficult to read anything that does not have a right-wing focus, if you continue to believe what an amazing fair eagle your country is, then stop reading now. Because this is my blog, and I get to rant, and I am not ranting against you people here personally that I love, but I am going to rant anyway. So really, go away if you don't want to read it. But I get to say it.

I am sick to death of hearing about America and the evil antichrist Obama. So many people the world over are dying, and all we hear about are the eroding freedoms under the great evil socialist. (Which is not to say that your freedoms perhaps are not being eroded, or that Obama isn't in fact a socialist or even that he is not the antichrist. But I'm not sure what I think about all three of those words, freedom, socialism, antichrist. And my focus isn't so much on what might be actually happening - of which obviously I know very little apart from what I am told - but my focus is more on what America seems to be encouraged to believe about herself, and what she is therefore discouraged to believe about herself. That's the part that interests me.)

I am sure many believe Obama is the antichrist. There is no end to the fear available to fuel end-times scenarios, is there? And there is so much extra fear around these days, surely there must be multiple more end-times scenarios. Such an easy way to divide the wheat from the tares. And anyway, we all know the book of Revelation is about America, right? She's gotta be in there, that great eagle? That has to be America, surely. America, America. The land of the free, and the home of the brave. The country that had one attack perpetrated on it (a mighty, amazing, Hollywood-sized attack) that was awful and horrible, and the retribution that came afterwards was 100 times fiercer. But that's okay. You have to protect yourselves after all, don't you.

You're not free and you're not brave, you know. You're rich and fat and greedy and lazy like all of us rich, fat, greedy, lazy Western people are. How many of you continue to believe you are the great benevolent eagle spreading freedom all over the world? Does it surprise and baffle you that the rest of the world sees you quite differently? The world, unfortunately, cannot be rebadged by Disney to make it something nice and palatable for you to feel better about yourselves being the great spreader of Christ and democracy. Because you are not. Did you really think you would get away with being rich and powerful and it not somehow affecting everyone else? Affecting yourselves? As if the deceitfulness of riches was hyperbole? As if you haven't been imprisoned inside your own wealth like the rest of us?

It amazes me how the more people wilfully refuse to ask the hard questions and want everything to be "nice" cannot see the predators in their own midst. It happens on a psyche level and it happens on a national one too. Some people go on about Obama turning America into a socialist state, as if socialism sits somewhere directly to the left of middle right on the political spectrum. They insist on maintaining their freedoms to the extent that they will allow predators like the media and advertising to continue to gobble them up and they don't seem to be able to readily see the paradox. They won't put limits on anything because that is curtailing their freedom.

But what is freedom, exactly? Is it freedom to do what is right, or freedom to do whatever you want?

Perhaps freedom has become the American god. Believe me, past foreign policy makes it pretty evident to the rest of the world that America will insist on her right to keep what she has, even if it involves suppressing those who do not have. This is what rich countries do. The deeper the wealth the deeper the moat. Not that I imagine foreign policy and its effects is something that FOX News has regular in-depth analysis about. There are two sides to every story. If you read every story with the desire to see yourselves as the heroes, then you won't be asking and reading and listening with discernment, asking why stuff is packaged to you in the way that it is. It's easier to watch cable news. It can just simply reinforce your prejudices about all those evil socialist Latin American countries lurking and trying to take away your freedoms from you. When you are the hero in the storybook, you do not readily wish to see what your past governments have done to other countries in the name of keeping YOUR freedoms intact - the richest country the world has ever seen, and you have run in fear for the past 50 years that it is going to be taken away from you. Perhaps this is partly what Jesus was talking about with the deceitfulness of riches. It doesn't feel like a particularly safe space to occupy, to me. How about you?

I'm sick of hearing political stories about people's freedoms being taken away all the time. So much focus, so much fearmongering by the media, and some drink it down whenever it is on offer, without discernment. A country full of Christians who are told not to fear. You've got a tap full of clean, running water whenever you damn well want it. Maybe turn off FOX and drink that one down instead. The kingdom of heaven is still near, still sitting outside of what is happening in our individual countries, the third way. Maybe the world would be safer if we Christians turn our focus there.

Riding the Wind

I read this yesterday from Kent. Then I went to my art therapy class yesterday and Maggie said in passing something about being free to ride the wind. And it was like I felt it rustling through my insides:

Let go of the mistaken notion of certainty and the false sense that it in some way makes you secure and you might be surprised when the familiar "fixed" view you have had of things begins to be dismantled and following the Spirit who is like the wind begins to look not only doable...but actually exciting and awe producing in it's simplicity.

I am so aware - in awe, really - of how much there is that I do not know. Of how much things change when you are willing to sit with the disparities of what is. The beauty of small steps, of small things, of lives lived quietly, of the beauty of solitude and the warmth of friendship. Of the wonderment I spy, sometimes, of an everyday life, of the way it is right for my life to fit me.

The beauty that flows underneath everything is like silk, like chocolate, like strength, like love, like discipline all rolled into one. We become ever so incrementally mouldable under its gaze.

Pic: Never Alone by aussiepatches

A Different Path

It’s not, “If I am moral, I will someday achieve union with God.” That’s backwards. We must put the horse before the cart, and not the cart before the horse. Union with God is objectively already given to everyone from the moment of their creation. Who else created them? All we can do is awaken to it. We cannot achieve it. Once we live the life of union and abundance—not hating ourselves and apologizing for ourselves every minute—then we start living in our inherent dignity, a dignity that no behavior has given to us and no one can take away.

Then the horse is first and the cart comes along. Not “If I am moral, I will be in union with God, but when I live in union with God, morality will come naturally and powerfully!” A completely different path.

Richard Rohr

Law in Grace Clothing??

I was just debating in the shower why it is that that phrase that Christians trot out, Love God, Love Others, as what we are to do, why it is that it sounds like a two-legged tripod.

Of course, really, that's the law, isn't it. It's another sort of spreadsheet-type thing that we can put on our to-do lists. Have I loved God today? Tick. Have I been nice to the little old lady down the street? Tick.

Sometimes I think Love God, Love Others is some sort of thing we do to keep God over there. It's a sort of a continuum on which are all sorts of things, like, for example, a man buying his wife flowers because he's been sleeping with the woman in Accounts.

Does this sound harsh and indictable? It is not an indictable offence. It is just how we operate. We are wily, we will keep God away from us. He is terrifying in his Love.

Be Loved By God.

Now, that's a far different saucepan of salmon, isn't it :)

'Cos sometimes when you do that, you'll be unable to be nice to the little old lady down the street because you'll be too immersed in your own shit for a season. Being loved by God is a million spanners in your nicely constructed works, and being loved by God is the only way that you have anything authentic to pass onto the little old lady down the street. Otherwise, she'll still smell within your kindness the faint whiff of agenda.

And the world is heartily battled fatigued by the agendas of Christians.

Freedom's Long Road

I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.

~ William Blake

Goodness, that is beautiful. If I can put aside my own incompatibilities with that statement and sit in his shoes and imagine how it must have felt being William Blake, I can understand how his wish as an old man for a young child was that God might make His world as beautiful to her as it had been to him. What great freedom William Blake had. I understand that freedom and stand in it swinging my arms, but I would be a fool to pretend ignorance of those contradictions that bind me whenever I want to prove myself by what I do, to bolster up my shaky self-esteem on accomplishments, on individualities, on being good in a competitive sense.

Not of course that this is a regular state of motivation for me, but it is still present, sitting out on my kidneys like fear, poking up its ugly head. Still bidding me to the fact that I am not as free as William Blake was. And that sobers me and it gives me hope, all at the same time, and calls me forward. It takes my own breath away when I feel how much life God wishes to breathe into me - is doing so.

Sometimes, I can quickly lose a sense of meaning and fall into despair. I do not wish for it to be so, but this is what happens. It happens when I spend too much time online, as I did last night, another bout of self-sabotage sending me tired to sit aimlessly clicking when there were books to read and dogs to pat and friends to speak to on telephones. Being online is wonderful but oh, boy, it is not neutral. it needs to be an accessory and a tool rather than a lifestyle, at least for me.

The Spirit returns me, this evening after work hopefully, back to the playroom to be creative once more, immersed in clay. It is where life makes sense for me. Clay is so easy to mould when the fingers that mould it are wet. I do believe none of our tears are wasted.

Like staring at the back of a TV set for 20 years

In a letter to Wayne Jacobsen on The God Journey, someone said:

In trying to explain this to others [the difference of a life lived in God rather than a life lived to try to placate God], I've used this analogy: it's as if I've been looking at the back of a television for the last 20-odd years, wondering if this really is all there is. All of a sudden the TV's been turned around and I'm beginning to experience what I was meant to find all along.

Wayne:

Boy, if boring doesn't describe religion, I don't know what else does. It's like looking at the back of a TV set for 20 years.

Hehe :) Now, just to reiterate, I'm not talking about every Christian who goes to a Sunday morning meeting that is boring or 'religious'. Neither are all of the meetings themselves boring or 'religious'. But most of them are, for mine, not out of bad intentions but just because most of them are so bogged down in ... I dunno, tradition, religion, fear, that the life only gets to poke its head up here and there throughout the service before, oops, it's time for the fourth song, or you can't say that because you're just the congregation, or you can't have those problems because you're a believer, bathed in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, the Lord Jesus Christ ain't stopped me from having a whole lot of shit happen. In fact, all the Christians I know that I like best, both online and offline, are the ones who are having a whole lot of shit happening to them. Because they're admitting it, right? 'Cause they can. 'Cause the religious folk are having bad shit happen to them too, but they can't admit it because it doesn't fit into their religious paradigm. A paradigm which has basically nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the way people have related to him since forever. The religious system is not about God. It doesn't say anything about God as much as it says everything about human beings and why it is that we need God. And that counts for every single bloody one of us.

I said on Erin's blog the other day that I hate Christians. Actually, I think I said I fucking hate Christians. Which is pretty harsh, really. But I do, because they are some of the ugliest people on the planet, the overtly religious person who doesn't realise it. They come out of all religions. But the extent of my anger really probably says more about where I'm at than anything. 'Cause I might have spied out some good land, and even rolled around in its grasses, and I might be having some sort of a relationship with God that has actually got to the point where I feel safer in him than I ever have ever in any human person, and which has achieved a depth where, like last night, I can be driving to the video store and have this moment where I just felt this communion that brought tears to my eyes at the thought of him.

But I'm still the kind of person who 10 minutes later was bored, who has still got a whole lot of critical, judgmental things going down. And the place I can see that the most is in the way I treat my brothers and sisters, even if it's "not hurting anybody", even if it's only in my own head. 'Cause really, if I'd rolled around in the grass enough, I'd have come to the conclusion that it's not all about me, and about scoring points off other people even if it's in my own head. And that sucks just as much as being a 'religous' folk does.

Well, almost ;)

Systems failure

The authority that we need must be total. It can no longer come from mere church mandate or Bible interpretation, but it must also come from our souls. We need Christians who have souls!

Only people with inner authority, what Gandhi called "soul force", are capable of true nonviolence. Only they can both let things be and call them into being. They alone create. All the rest of us simply rearrange.

Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace

I am thinking of about seven different strands this morning regarding systems and their failures. Whether I can whittle it down into something coherent remains to be seen :) Kent is talking on his blog about the failure of law to bring about what we intend it to bring about. Once you start seeing it, it's very difficult to stop seeing how our efforts to enforce our safety and security by law backfire.

I think of the new law encoded recently by the Australian Football League. Because of one incident occurring several weeks ago involving an interchange stuff-up, the League, in typical reactionary fashion, has introduced a convoluted new system of rules and regulations that I can't even be fucked looking into, to be honest, to try and stop something so horrible and market-share-reducing as a mistake.

Knee-jerk reactions by insecure people who feel like they have to be seen to do something by the general insecure public, most of who want something done, something coded, something fixed, goddammit, so that they can feel like they've got some control.

Well, you know what, people? We're not in control. We never have been. Control is an illusion, designed by your fearful brain to make you feel like enshrining laws is going to make the world a safer place. But you know what? Enshrining laws just contributes to the feeling that most people have that they don't get to really be themselves, to any sort of degree, because they don't know what the rules are. If someone will just tell them the rules, then everything will be okay.

But it won't be okay. Not until we all start taking goddamn responsiblity for being in our own skins, instead of wanting a bunch of people in uniforms to tell us how it should be done. What happens if deep down we often know how it should be done, whatever that means at any one time, for a particular situation? Imagine if, using our God-given inner authority, we got about living on gut feelings and compassion and reasoning and logic and common sense and aesthetics and paradox and because the sky screams it instead of doing it because rule 3.5(a)(1) says so?

Knowing for ourselves what is right, stops us from being coerced and manipulated by people whose motives are generally ulterior. Hell, everyone's motives are ulterior. We've all got agendas. The good widdle government man isn't just encoding a law to make you feel safer. He's encoding a law because he doesn't really know what the fuck to do, and this sounds alright, and it'll quell the vocal fearful.

Every law that is encoded to make you feel safer takes away a tiny little bit of you, and your own ability to act (or not) out of what you know is right. Acting because a law says so when your head and heart are not in agreement is not acting at all, it's following. Walking about in a world that is so blanketed in rules and laws is not freedom. The guy in prison because he's tanked himself up on crystal meth is a total danger to society, and in that situation steps need to be taken to try to minimise the harm to himself and others.

But a world that never questions the policeman nor the law behind him - that's a million times more dangerous. People who have been taught to not question or think for themselves? They're the most dangerous because they never have to question why they are manipulative, vengeful, hateful, and happy to lord it over others in the name of politics, religion, peace or safety.

It just won't wash. Or it shouldn't. But it does, every day, with fabric conditioner to boot. Because we've been taught that we can't do anything about it. That's the worst part about living for the rules. It might make you think you're safe, but really it's just making you not think much at all.

All the better to manipulate you with.

Now Radio Susie is gonna be singing I Am the Law by Human League all afternoon :)

It's a beautiful day out there, the last day of Autumn. It's a beautiful thang, also, to be aware of all of this systemic shit, to get passionate about it, but to not get carried away by despair over it. That's no small thing in this society.

The sun is shining and the shit goes on, but that's our world. Happy Saturday, bloggers :)

Edit: And anyway, I can't get too despondent about too much happening in the world because I really believe that, underneath it all, waves like this are coming. I can feel it in my marrow. And I've never ever learnt to surf but I've always always wanted to :)

Law or harmony

I'm loving Kent's journey, because it's also my own. It's difficult to communicate grace. It's easier to communicate angst than it is to communicate happiness. Somehow the angst comes through front on, face to face, but communicating happiness, harmony, grace - it can very easily feel kitschy or corny. Don't you hate that?

Angst doesn't need anything but itself to communicate itself. Harmony needs a juxtaposition to communicate itself clearly. It needs just as much to communicate what it isn't, as what it is.

Still, I imagine one day it won't. I don't know how that will be - probably when everyone is walking in it, and we are a giant orchestra, and we don't communicate it so much as just walk around in it and swim in it.

Spreadsheeting bad behaviour - which column?

The Australian Federal government is trying to address teenage binge drinking by proposing a tax hike for premixed alcoholic beverages like vodka and orange and bourbon and coke (two personal favourites in my teenage years, when I had the dosh).

The government believes that making these drinks more expensive will stop teenagers getting together and getting shitfaced. I wonder, do any of them really believe this, even a smidge? I know we are all economically rationalised to death and feel constrained onto spreadsheet columns, but does anyone at all involved with the government, including the toilet cleaners, really think that is anything but some sort of lip service? Surely not. And surely they don't think we're that stupid. And surely this is why listening to the blatherings of the world is so damn tiresome. It's enough to make you want to go and get shitfaced :)

This kind of thing really pisses me off. What a waste of time it all is. It's talking about issues without talking about issues. So much fluff, full of soundbytes and infuriatingly signifying nothing.

Teenagers get drunk because it feels really good to be pissed. Because they are full of angst and don't know who the hell they are and are suffering under the weight of living in a world where nothing gets discussed in ways that really make any kind of goddamned difference at all and because no one would listen if they said that Uncle Harry was doing bad stuff to them when no one was looking, or that they felt like losers because they didn't know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives and therefore which VCE stream to set themselves onto at 15 years of age. Or that they felt like they would never ever belong and it didn't seem like there was all that much to belong to anyway and hey, how bad does that make you feel when we are the lucky ones and the rest of the world is being flung about by tempestuous weather?

Teenagers get pissed because it is so nice to quell your fears and shame - and that is surely the absolute crux of it, for mine. Or at least, that was always the reason why I got drunk. To get me out of myself. To have a blast. To tell my friends I loved them (love ya mate, I'll luv ya forever, mate. Now excuse me while I go over here and vomit). To give me a bit of Dutch courage to talk to that boy and maybe get a pash (or more). Fear and shame pursue every single person down through the days and to not address that is to not address anything in the end.

But then, what column would that fit into on the spreadsheet? And is that the responsibility of the government anyway?

Taxing alcopops will make teenagers resort to drinking beer, or they will buy wine and mix their own orange juice in it. Or whatever. Or maybe - heaven forbid - they will buy Blackberry Nip or Brandivino and mix it with Coke. However far your dosh spreads. 'Cause it's not about the taste so much as it's about the high and about the quell. And I really just don't know how that one can be regulated. 'Cause you can stuff it down and keep on going, but so far I have really only found one Place where fear and shame have been nailed. And it's got nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with Love.

Freedom

I've just been reading through some of my blogroll this morning, and saw this comment Kent made (hope you don't mind me repeating it here, Kentster). The conversation was amongst other things about healthy boundaries, and exactly what they look like. He made the point:

I believe healthy boundries do exist but what I was trying to explain (and this is just my observation from my experience) is that our understanding of what they are is much different than what Jesus seems to demonstrate. The only place healthy exists is within a relationship with Father following his lead.

This really defines for me why it is that a life lived in the love of the Father and walking in whatever that means every day (with many days where he doesn't seem to be saying much at all) cannot be determined or judged on the outside by another human being. Because God is not a formula to be worked, as Wayne Jacobsen has said, it can never be a made-in-China one-size-fits-all approach to walking in what he is asking us to do. Some people really should be out there spilling their guts for the homeless, for example (I would like to one day be that someone, maybe). Others really should be home praying and being the Soul of the Body. Some people are both of those two elements, and one day they will be one, one day the other (this is even closer to what I want to be).

A formula, something that can be Excel spreadsheeted, is sure and believable and seeable and categorisable and I can go away and rest securely in the knowledge that I'm working the formula and so therefore I must be on the right track. And yet what God is asking of me may be the opposite, for me, today.

Our view of how much of a cosmic killjoy God is, how rigid and puritanical he is, will determine what we think he could be saying to us, too. Maybe he's yelling certain things at us and we dismiss them as our own wayward desires. Seems to me, sometimes the things he asks of us will seem frivolous and pointless. Informed out of our culture of grey docility and economically rationalist uncreativity, my bet is that God is probably just a little bit more frivolous and out-there than we have often are led to think. And if we have stifled the things he may have made for us to do, then they definitely often feel too good to be true - which is part of the reason why we have stifled them in the first place. Who can play music, or draw, or run, or write a story, or do anything vaguely fun at all when there are starving people in the world?

I've been pondering this the last day. Got out of the house and hung with a friend yesterday for over three hours at Seddon Deadly Sins. This cafe was originally started by an artist and consisted of a coffee machine at one end and an easel at the other. Coffee lovers would come and watch him work. This guy's art now adorns the walls of the cafe that he sold, now that he is making enough money from his art. I love artistic happy endings! And now this cafe is this buzzing, vibrant place that has grown into something even better now it has passed on to new hands, a creative-feeling place that fosters relaxation and happy possibilities (the food just rocks). Somehow, the time went past in double speed while we were there.

It was so good to get out of the house and my own head after the rather bizarre week I've had spiritually, being so inwardly focussed on the parts of me that I hate the most. It really does feel like something shifted in my soul. It felt like a necessary thing, to go inward and be all self-absorbed and caught up in myself. Even though my inner Puritan bemoans the self-indulgence (and quite rightly, too - how unattractive self-absorption is, how drear and irritating for the absorbed), it was necessary. In hindsight, It felt like God led me there, did some spiritual curetting. I'm glad I wasn't aware of the surgery in hindsight - much better to have that kind of thing foisted upon you unawares than know it's coming, for mine.

Anyway, my rambling point I'm trying to make to myself is this: freedom in God means that when he leads me inward to do what needs to be done, whether it feels self-indulgent or not is pointless in some ways because it's going where he leads. If I sat there the next day when he didn't lead me inward and just focussed on my own stuff, then I could probably legitimately call it self-indulgence and there could possibly be very little fruit that I would glean from the experience.

I just did some centering prayer earlier (another thing which feels self-indulgent. Do you see a pattern here? That inward voice labelling certain things as self-indulgent is, I suspect, what is referred to in novels as an unreliable narrator. I really don't know what is good for me and what isn't). Anyway, I was doing some centering prayer and had this picture flash into my mind, an almost-fully-formed idea that I want to at least attempt to draw. They are happening often for me, these days, these inward flashes of visual inspiration. Ever since I started dabbling in a bit of drawing. Often I feel frustrated, that what I am seeing is way, way beyond what I am able to reproduce but still - for all that, it's very exciting. It feels like creatively, there are fruitful things bubbling below the surface, and these days, even when the island of creativity feels far away I am beginning to see boats and giant ropes and flying foxes that enable me to get from here to there again.

But my inner Puritan balks at all this creativity on one level. Granted, it is a very small level, really. So small that I can reach out and squash it quite easily with my bare feet (it explodes like a grape). I just found out recently from my Dad that my great grandparents were Plymouth Brethren stock. So I really do have inner Puritans flowing through my veins! Luckily, my grandfather added a bit more spice to the blood, cleansed it somewhat, through his own rebellion. Poor dear, he really didn't have a lot of choice but to rebel, did he? :)

So yes, my inner Puritan(s) balk on one level at all this creative indulgence that feels like self-indulgence and which I know is nothing of the sort. They ask me how I can live a life that includes colour and movement, love and life when there is so much suffering in the world. I ask them in return, twice as loud, how I possibly couldn't.

The light overcomes the darkness. King David danced down the road out of his love for God and made a fool of himself. Better a dancing fool than a Michel, looking out the window, ultimately jealous of David's freedom. Dancing foolity for God opens up the heart - opens it up enough to let compassion for other's suffering enter in. Being centred within myself, doing the things that open up life to me, is the surest way I can find to walking towards the suffering of others and having enough left over to give. Fruit only grows from an excess of energy.

Happy Saturday to ye, bloggers!