baby it's cold outside:  24º, with blankets of snow fallen yesterday; the sky is hazy like old blue jeans, faded and worn.

sunlight pours in a window where a string of tibetan prayer flags are strung.  a length of about five flags hangs straight down beyond the nail my son sank to hang the multi-colored cloths with ancient sacred texts inscribed.  a wall heater blows warm air up through these overhanging flags, causing them to slowly wave, sending their prayers into the cosmos, into our hearts.  

the skeptic in me says what a joke, what a silly religious ritual, what a perfect match with our modern self-important, narcissistic, overly stressed and busy culture:  too busy to pray (or meditate, or practice yoga, or, or, or...) we can hang up some flags to automatically do it for us.  the skeptic.

but the heart in me feels the exotic memory of climbing the long stairway to  swayambunath temple in kathmandu, monkeys and monks begging along the way, prayer flags flying all around, the warmth and humidity half choking, half caressing.  holding the woman's hand who would become my wife, the mother of our children; who would one day, on my 40th birthday, string up three lengths of these flags outside a community center in davis, california, into which i stepped to hear shouts of 'surprise!'  the flags that later hung on a porch bannister she would gaze out upon from her hospice bed one day.

o heart of mine, shine.  o heart of the world, receive these prayers - both sent effortlessly by sheets of cloth - and those sent with poignant tears from memories of long ago.

the cursor is taunting me, clearly.  write something lyrical it says, or be profound, come on, what's taking you so long?  it's partly sunny out today, but mainly cloudy.  do we want more sun, is that implied in the phrase 'partly cloudy'?  or is it a grim and prosaic reminder of the random nature of weather?

'partly matter' we might call the weather of this vast universe.  physicists tell us even space itself is full of energy - photons, magnetic and other energy fields - just bristling with it, a veritable soup, savory and thick.  and that there is probably as much dark matter as there is the usual kind.  then again, matter itself, that which has mass, we are told is nearly as empty as space.  pounding, pulsing, bouncing, flowing, melting forces of energy.  a grand illusion of substance - but oh, what a wondrous illusion!

this morning i was listening to a jessye norman cd.  after our recent moves, i had gotten rid of probably three quarters of our cd collection, and i don't know how it came to be, but that cd followed me here.  i had never played it through, i didn't even know how we came to possess it - a gift perhaps.  the cd title, amazing grace.  african-american, jessye's operatic soprano is rich, but not necessarily my cup of tea.  how did i end up with it in my radically down-sized cd collection?  

what dark matter, strong force, cosmic connection brought me to a time where i am now dating a lovely african-american woman soprano, who very much likes jessye norman?

i've got sunshine...

test post...

what's with bunnies and mangoes?  is it as kinky as it sounds?

i was a peace corps volunteer in nepal back in the eighties.  one afternoon some school children ran past my mud hut.  inside, under the thatch roof, i was hard at work reading hemingway or perhaps journaling, maybe even doing laundry, though this was usually done in the morning, after a breakfast of rice and daal, by hand, down by the river.  afternoon rem was an occasional pastime.  but i was awake, i remember that.

as they ran past, the kids chanted 'aap bhanne ke?  aap bhanne mango!' this translates to 'what is aap [in english]?  aap is mango!'  a transliteration of the sentence - that is, what it sounds like - is the title of this blog, my email, etc.  every time i see or hear it, i am transported back to that idyllic time.  

besides, who doesn't like bunnies and mangoes?